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Threat of chemical weapon from Assad’s Syria

Jul 6, 2015

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U.S. intelligence agencies say there is a strong possibility the Assad regime will use chemical weapons on a large scale as part of a last-ditch effort to protect important Syrian government strongholds if rebel fighters and Islamists were about to overrun them.

U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal that analysts and policy makers have been carefully examining all available intelligence in order to determine what types of chemical weapons the Assad regime might be able to deploy and what developments would trigger their use.

Following a 21 August 2013 sarin gas attack by the Syrian military on Sunni suburbs of Damascus, in which more than 1,400 civilians were killed, President Bashar al-Assad, under a threat of a U.S. military strike, allowed international inspectors to remove the Syrian regime’s most toxic chemical weapons.

According to HomeLand Security News Wire , U.S., European, and Israeli intelligence services say that after the most toxic chemicals were removed and more than a dozen chemical weapon production site dismantled, the Assad regime has developed and deployed a new type of chemical bomb filled with chlorine. U.S. intelligence officials say Assad may now decide to use these weapons on a larger scale in key strategic areas. U.S. officials told the Journal that they also suspect that the regime may have kept at least a small quantity of the chemical precursors needed to make nerve agents sarin or VX. Analysts note that the Assad regime has used chlorine-based chemical weapons on about two dozen occasions in 2014 and early 2015, but that if the regime were to employ sarin or VX weapons, the international reaction may be severe because these agents are more deadly than chlorine and were supposed to have been removed from Syria.

Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former commanding officer of the British army’s chemical-weapons unit, said: “Even if the regime had only one ton of VX left, that would be enough to kill thousands of people.”

The intelligence is “being taken very seriously because he’s getting desperate” and because of doubts within the U.S. intelligence community that Assad gave up all of his deadliest chemical weapons, a senior U.S. official told the Journal.