Syria’s Deputy Foreign Minister Faysal Mekdad denied yesterday that his government had ever used chemical weapons or chlorine during the brutal war in his country.

However, he warned that jihadist terror groups were using such weapons.

Mr Mekdad told a meeting of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague that terror groups “have used chlorine gas in several of the regions of Syria and Iraq.”

The organisation is in the final stages of eliminating the Syrian government’s stockpile of nerve agents and poison gas, helping international efforts to prevent terrorists using such weapons.

His accusation confirms what Iraqi officials said in October about Islamic State (Isis) militants using chlorine gas during fighting with security forces and Shi’ite militiamen north of Baghdad.

The statements

in Iraq were released two days after Kurdish officials and doctors expressed their belief that Isis militants had released some kind of toxic gas in an eastern district of the northern Syrian town of Kobane.

President Bashar al-Assad’s government was widely accused of having unleashed chemical weapons during the war, despite its repeated denials.

United Nations disarmament head Angela Kane acknowledged the new risks posed by terrorists.

“There is a very distinct threat that has arisen and actually also is being investigated by the OPCW with a fact-finding mission,” she said, adding that various international bodies and the UN are co-ordinating efforts to fight terrorism.

In a preliminary report issued in September, the fact-finding mission concluded that a toxic chemical, almost certainly chlorine, was used “systematically and repeatedly” as a weapon in attacks on villages in northern Syria earlier this year, but it didn’t apportion blame.

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) announced yesterday that it has suspended a food voucher programme serving more than 1.7 million Syrian refugees because of a funding crisis.

The programme provided refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt with vouchers to buy food in local shops.

The UN agency said that, without the assistance, “many families will go hungry.”

WFP executive director Ertharin Cousin says the agency’s Syria emergency operations are in critical need of funding — requiring $64 million (£38m) to support Syrian refugees in December alone.