Chemical Weapons in Syria – Not a Surprise

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The new international report suggesting Syria still has a large stockpile of chemical weapons, was no surprise to Israeli experts, who have claimed again and again that the Assad regime has kept this deadly capability, and that all the reports on a “Syria clean from chemical weapons” were in fact false.

An Israeli expert following the situation in Syria said that Assad has misled international controllers that were sent to oversee the removal of these weapons. “It was so easy for Assad to play the game”, said the expert.

According to thetower.org, traces of deadly nerve agents were found in Syria at sites that were not previously declared by the Damascus regime. U.S. and European officials have expressed concerns about Syria’s chemical weapons program.

A classified report by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said that most of the 122 samples that the OPCW collected at multiple sites in Syria “indicate potentially undeclared chemical weapons-related activities.”

According to Foreign Policy, the new OPCW report found that the Syrian government “failed to provide sufficient access to senior leaders in its chemical weapons program or to adequately account for 2,000 aerial bombs that Syria acknowledges were designed to deliver mustard gas.”

Kenneth Ward, the American representative to the OPCW, said that the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had launched “a calculated campaign of intransigence and obfuscation, of deception, and of defiance,” and added that the samples were “indicative of production, weaponization, and storage of [chemical warfare] agents by the Syrian military that has never been acknowledged by the Syrian government.”