When ISIS spread it hold over Mosul in 2014, the city claimed to have the greatest weapons bonanza destined to fell in militant hands. The city was full of army bases, stocks of guns, bombs, rockets and even battle tanks.
Terrorists used almost all of them but fortunately, couldn¡¯t lay their hands on Cobalt-60 which was locked on a college campus in Mosul. The agencies were aware of the cobalt-60 and watched intensely for three years for signs that the militants might try to use it.
AFP
The concern had grown in late 2014 when IS boasted of obtaining radioactive material, and again early last year when the terrorists took over laboratories at the same Mosul college campus with the apparent aim of building new kinds of weapons.
Independent nuclear experts had drafted papers in Washington and ran calculations about the potency of the cobalt and the extent of damage it could cause. The details were kept under wraps on the chance that Mosul's occupiers might not be fully aware of what they had.
"They are not that smart," a relieved health ministry official said of the city's former occupiers. Luckily, the IS terrorist couldn¡¯t use to cobalt-60 otherwise the damage to Iraq and other neighbouring regions would have been catastrophic.?