Even after the fall of Assad there are still unsecured chemical weapons in Syria

Since the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime, chemical weapons have been stored in unsecured locations since the fall of Bashar al-Assad. This is apparent from an inventory by the OPCW, the UN organization that is committed to a ban on chemical weapons, written The New York Times Sunday.

The OPCW, with its headquarters in The Hague, estimates that there are more than a hundred locations related to the Syrian chemical weapon program. These are places where research has been done into sarin, mustard gas and chlorine gas, and places where these gases are produced and stored. The number of locations is much higher than the 27 that Assad has given openness in the past.

Destruction of arms stocks

The handling of Assad’s chemical weapons is an important touchstone for the international status of the Syrian transitional government led by President Ahmed al-Sharaa. To be eligible for a partial lifting of sanctions, the new regime must meet a series of conditions, including the destruction of all remaining chemical weapons stocks. At the end of March, Reuters news agency reported that the United States have handed over such a list of conditions to Syria.

Al-Sharaa’s rebel group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), who fells Assad’s reign in December with a lightning offensive, is designated by the US as a terrorist organization, but has renounced its ties with al-Qaeda. The Syrian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Asad Al-Shaibani, promised in March, During a speech to the OPCW meeting in The Hague, “All remains of the chemical weapon program developed under the Assad regime [te] to destroy ”and from now on to adhere to international law.

Nerve gas

It is certain that Assad used chemical weapons, both in the fight against insurgents after the start of the civil war, in 2011, and against citizens. In an attack in 2013 with Sarin in Ghouta, east of Damascus, more than a thousand people were killed. After that attack, Assad contributed to the destruction of chemical weapons by a UN delegation, which was led by Sigrid Kaag. A year earlier, US President Obama said that the use of chemical weapons would be a “red line” by Syria, with “enormous consequences.” Obama suggested that his country would then intervene militarily. Once the time came, it didn’t happen.

From 2013 to at least 2018, attacks with battle gases were documented. And Syria has never stopped importing raw materials required for producing these weapons.

Air recordings of a mass grave in the Zamalka district in Damascus, where there are victims of a Sarin attack by troops from Assad in 2013.

Photo Hussein Malla/AP

The latest OPCW estimate, drawn up on the basis of research by experts, NGOs and information from Member States, is according to The New York Times Recently shared with international experts in the field of non-proliferation. It would partly concern storage places in caves. “There are many locations that we know nothing about, because the regime [van Assad] Against the OPCW lied ”, the newspaper Raed Al-Saleh, head of the Syrian aid organization Witte Helmets.

Israeli officials have said earlier that Israel would also have hit storage places for chemical weapons during his air strikes in Syria. Observers are very concerned about the security of stored weapons, especially now that in Syrian coastal provinces, violence has again broken out between armed groups that support the new government and Alawites, the population group to which Assad belongs.

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