Jordan, UAE test ability to respond to chemical attack

 ZARQA — Jordan and United Arab Emirates special forces tested on Monday their abilities to respond to chemical attacks on a fictitious dried-out tent city in the Kingdom’s desert plain amid a 15-day military exercise involving combined land, air and sea manoeuvres across the country.

With the “Fruitful Coordination“ codeword for the operation within the Eager Lion — drills with a theme of irregular warfare —  security forces pulled survivors and corpses from the contaminated area targeted by the chemical weapon attack.

“The scenario was one of a chemical attack in a refugee camp; however, this could happen in other contexts,“ Director of Joint Military Training at the Jordan Armed Forces Brigadier General Fahed Damen told reporters after the war game.

“We have factories in Jordan that use chemicals in their production, potentially triggering a similar emergency situation,” Damen added, vehemently denying that this exercise could be seen as a response to recent alleged use of chemical weapons against civilians in Syria.

Damascus has denied allegations of military use of chlorine, but the opposition said it has been repeatedly dropped from helicopters in barrel bombs in recent months.

“The exercise does not have anything to do with what is happening outside Jordan. This is only a training and part of Jordan’s policy,” Damen told The Jordan Times.

Acting refugees began vomiting and shaking after the attack, with toxic smoke wafting through the fictitious camp patrolled by security forces.

Teams from chemical support and crisis management units, special forces, civil defence and medical services dressed in black chemical protection suits pulled simulated victims of the attack from the area contaminated by chemical agents to decontamination stations.

Victims were given drugs such as Atropine as a temporary antidote to the immediate effects of poisoning by nerve agents ahead of decontamination showers.

Special forces set up two decontamination stations to thoroughly cleanse the casualties using special hoses and assess residual evidence of chemical or biological substances on their bodies.

A five-tonne tank sprinkled super tropical bleach, a chlorine-based bleach, on the ground to neutralise chemical agents on the ground of the attack.

“The participation and the exercise were excellent,” Damen told reporters. “One of our goals was to test the relation between Jordan’s Armed Forces, security bodies, state institutions and governmental departments,”he added.

Asked about US President Barack Obama’s plan announced earlier last week to increase assistance to the Syrian opposition, opening the way for the likely training and equipping of moderate rebels fighting leader Bashar Assad, involving Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, Damen said Jordan’s policy was one of non-intervention.

“Jordan’s stand in the Syrian conflict is clear. We are not intervening in the conflict and we do not train anyone in Jordan,” he told The Jordan Times.

The US currently has roughly 1,500 military troops in Jordan, in addition to the approximately 6,000 that recently arrived to participate in the Eager Lion exercise, according to Reuters.

Last year, after Eager Lion 2013 finished, the US left a detachment of F-16 fighter jets and a Patriot missile battery in Jordan, and about 1,000 forces associated with the aircraft and missile system, a move that many saw as forming a potential basis of an assault in Syria.

Training and the US Central Command Maj. Gen. Robert Catalanotti told reporters at the drills’ opening press conference that this year no equipment would stay in Jordan. When the American troops leave Jordan, they will take everything back, he stressed.

The war games exercise — held for the third time in Jordan in cooperation with the US army — has brought together this year 12,000 personnel from 20 Arab and European nations to train on border security, irregular warfare, terrorism and counterinsurgency running from May 25 to June 10.