http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenfield/did-islamic-state-jihadists-contract-ebola-in-wmd-plot/

January 2, 2015 by Daniel Greenfield 0 Comments

ISIS keeps finding new ways to be nastier. Beheadings. Child beheadings. Sex slaves. Sex slave markets. Now it got tired of Ebola stealing all the headlines and decided that, like peanut butter and jelly, ISIS and Ebola would be good together.

The World Health Organization is investigating reports that ISIS militants have been showing up at an Iraqi hospital with Ebola.
According to three media outlets an undisclosed number of militants displaying signs of the disease attended a hospital in the ISIS-held city of Mosul, 250 miles north of Baghdad.
According to a report in Iraq’s pro-government newspaper, al Sabaah, the disease was brought to Mosul by ‘terrorists’ arriving ‘from several countries’ and Africa.
Very few ISIS fighters are believed to have travelled up from West Africa where the Ebola outbreak originated with most coming from areas where there have been no reports of the disease.
The reports have appeared in pro-government and Kurdish media but if true it could have catastrophic implications for people in ISIS-held areas as the group is against western science and medicine.

The “very few” part is what makes it unlikely. Such an infection is highly unlikely to have occurred in the natural course of things. So it’s either untrue or it may have been a viral smuggling plot gone bad.

ISIS has been very interested in WMDs. Ebola seems like a good candidate because there were thousands of corpses, poorly attended, making it seem like a no-brainer. Such a plot would be stupid for a number of reasons, trying to use a highly infectious disease in a single country without it backfiring would be a terrible idea, and so would trying to get samples of it over to Iraq.

The Soviets, who were professionals, messed up their WMD program in frightening ways, including releasing weaponized smallpox, anthrax and a number of others into populated areas. The attempts by Soviet agents to smuggle samples of diseases out of the United States also ended with them getting infected. The same thing may have happened here.

The Iraqi government has already denied the report, but it’s about as reliable as the media outlets reporting on this, which is not very.

Filed Under: The Point

About Daniel Greenfield

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century.