The fall of Syrian President Bashar Assad, who has been found to have used chemical weapons against his own people on multiple occasions during the civil war, creates an opportunity for the country to rid itself of the banned munitions, diplomatic sources said on Monday.
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said it was monitoring the situation in Syria with “particular attention” to chemical weapons-related sites and reminded Syria, through its representative office, of its ongoing obligation to declare and destroy all banned chemical weapons.
An OPCW team has spent more than a decade trying to clarify what types of chemical weapons Syria still possesses, but has made little progress due to obstruction by the Assad government, the organization said.
“This activity continues to this day, and Syria’s declaration of its chemical weapons program cannot yet be considered accurate and complete,” the OPCW said in a statement.
The diplomatic source said that the Assad government had “played cat and mouse with us for years” and “we are convinced that they still have an ongoing program” that has cost millions and millions of dollars without any progress. So now is a really great opportunity to get rid of [chemical weapons] for good. This is the moment, said the source, who asked not to be named.
OPCW inspectors will need to secure security guarantees before any deployment. That would require contacting new power players in Syria, likely militant forces in the alliance that toppled Assad, such as Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, a former al-Qaeda affiliate that some governments have designated a terrorist group.
Previous missions have not been without risk. Members of the United Nations and OPCW missions in Syria were hit by explosives and AK-47 fire while trying to reach the site of a chemical attack in the northern town of Kafr Zita in May 2014.
Assad’s government and its Russian allies have always denied using chemical weapons against a rival in the civil war, which broke out in March 2011.
Three separate investigations – a joint UN-OPCW mechanism, the OPCW investigation and identification team and the UN war crimes investigation – have concluded that Syrian government forces used the nerve agent sarin and chlorine barrel bombs in attacks during the civil war that killed or injured thousands of people.
A French court issued an arrest warrant for Assad, which was confirmed after an appeal for the use of banned chemical weapons against civilians, Reuters reports.
