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Press TV has conducted an interview with Zayd al-Isa, a Middle East expert, from London, about Iraq’s report to the UN that ISIL militants took control of chemical weapons stored in the country in June.

Press TV: ISIL terrorists have gained access to this weapons facility. Is the worst yet to come for Iraq now?

al-Isa: Well, I’m actually quite surprised because we all know that the US when it invaded Iraq it invaded on the false premise and the false pretense that Iraq had possession of chemical and biological weapons.

And after they invaded Iraq they searched very hard, left no stone unturned in the relentless effort to find those weapons so that they can say they have been vindicated.

They were absolutely right about the intelligence, which they relied upon, which was false intelligence, which was actually cherry-picked in order to give them the perfect pretext to invade Iraq.

That means that what is coming out of this new development is that there were chemical weapons. And if there were indeed chemical weapons then the Americans have the duty and the responsibility to dismantle all of them to make sure that they cannot be used by any other operatives on the ground. It’s part and parcel of their responsibility to diffuse them and dismantle them.

I don’t understand why this hasn’t been done by the Americans and I do feel that the bulk of the responsibility falls clearly and squarely on the shoulders of the Americans who left such highly dangerous highly perilous weapons in Iraq, which should have been dismantled.

I do believe that if ISIL has such weapons it wouldn’t shy away or hesitate a minute from using them against their preferred and favorite targets, which is innocent civilians mainly Shias in the overwhelming Shia areas; and they wouldn’t even shy away from using them against hugely populated areas in Baghdad.

We’ve seen that there is a precedent that the al-Qaeda and whatever it calls itself - Islamic State - has used such weapons in Syria; they have used them against innocent civilians in their own areas in order to create the pretext and the excuse for the Americans to intervene and to target the Syrian regime.

So they wouldn’t really dither or hesitate a minute to use those highly dangerous and highly perilous weapons against their perceived enemies and mainly against civilians to make a new headway in their push towards Baghdad taking into consideration that the Iraqi army has held them at bay, that it actually has turned the tide against them and is now pushing them back from Tikrit towards Mosul.

That would be quite a weapon in the hands of al-Qaeda to try to hold back any advance by the Iraqi forces.

And I wouldn’t even be surprised that the other party, which shares responsibility for turning al-Qaeda into such a potent and lethal killing machine is Saudi Arabia, which basically has done the lion’s share of arming, financing, providing logistical support and even paying salaries to the Wahabi Salafist mercenaries to converge on Syria to facilitate and equip Jabhat al-Nusra, which is simply part and parcel of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which was reeling and on the back foot in 2008.

And it was all this help, this torrent of arming and funding coming from Saudi Arabia, which has basically enabled the resurgence and dramatic revival of al-Qaeda in Iraq into the most potent killing machine in the area.