Globe Trot: U.S. airstrikes hit chemical weapons factories in Iraq

IRAQ: As we reported previously, U.S. special forces captured the head of the Islamic State (ISIS) unit trying to develop chemical weapons in a raid in northern Iraq. Officials have now identified him as Sleiman Daoud al-Afari, who specialized in developing chemical and biological weapons for Saddam Hussein’s Military Industrialization Authority. But wait, Saddam Hussein didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, remember?

YEMEN: The four Catholic nuns murdered by Islamic militants in Yemen are from an order known for staying the course in war zones. I’ve seen the work of the the late Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity in Baghdad and in Syria among the poor and disabled, usually Ethiopian nuns like those killed. They were among 16 victims shot in the head March 4 by six unidentified gunmen who stormed a Catholic home for the elderly in Yemen’s southern port city of Aden.

SUDAN: Mourners continue to gather to pay homage to Hassan al-Turabi, 84, longtime Islamist hardliner and architect of Khartoum’s three-decade-old Islamic regime, who died March 5 and was buried Sunday. Turabi called al-Qaeda attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa “understandable” and invited Osama bin Laden to set up training camps in Sudan in the mid-1990s. He was the chief political force behind attacks on Christians in south Sudan during the country’s 20-plus-year civil war.

UNITED STATES: Republican frontrunner Donald Trump would upend foreign policy, according to an open letter signed by 100 largely conservative national security experts. Calling his policy statements “wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle,” the group writes: “We have disagreed with one another on many issues, including the Iraq war and intervention in Syria. But we are united in our opposition to a Donald Trump presidency.”