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Chemical Arms Inspectors Say Syria Has Destroyed All Declared Sites Syria Destroys Chemical Sites, Inspectors Say
(about 7 hours later)
LONDON — The international chemical weapons watchdog said on Thursday that Syria had met an important deadline for the “functional destruction” of all the chemical weapons production and mixing facilities it declared to inspectors, rendering them inoperable, under a deal brokered by Russia and the United States. BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syria’s ability to produce chemical weapons has been destroyed and its remaining toxic armaments secured, weapons inspectors said Thursday, as President Bashar al-Assad has offered unexpectedly robust cooperation, at least so far, with a Russian-United States accord to dismantle his arsenal.
While some experts depicted the announcement as a milestone, the measures left President Bashar al-Assad in control of a declared 1,290 metric tons of chemical weapons that are supposed to be destroyed by mid-2014, and an array of conventional weapons used in the country’s bloody civil war, in which over 100,000 people have died. Elimination of Mr. Assad’s manufacturing ability is the most significant milestone yet in a process that still faces a monumental task: destroying the government’s 1,290 tons of declared chemical weapons in the midst of a bloody civil war that has killed well over 100,000 people and carved up control of the country.
“The Assad regime continues to use artillery, air power and siege tactics against civilians, with thousands killed every month,” the British Foreign Office said in a statement. While the destruction of facilities is “an important first milestone, it brings no relief to the Syrian people.” Weapons inspectors who have been in the country just one month say that despite battles raging across the country, deep international disagreement over how to stop the war and even what United States officials say was an Israeli strike on a Syrian Army base late Wednesday night, Syria has so far met all of its commitments and deadlines.
“As winter approaches, the humanitarian situation grows more acute with millions left vulnerable,” the statement said. By doing so, Mr. Assad’s government can claim success in what it said would be a key benefit of the accord — seizing a new measure of credibility and portraying itself not as an outlaw regime but as a reliable and legitimate international player. But opponents of Mr. Assad, including the rebels, are deeply critical of the deal for that very reason — it has helped buttress his position but done nothing to stop the war.
The watchdog group, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, in The Hague, said in a statement that a joint team of its inspectors and United Nations officials had visited 21 of the 23 chemical sites Syria declared to them. While the remaining two sites were too hazardous to visit because of the country’s civil war, the chemical-making equipment there had already been moved to other sites that the inspectors could visit, the statement said. “They want to tell you, ‘It’s not because you put a deadline — when we say something, we do it before the time,’ ” a pro-government Syrian journalist, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, said of Syrian officials. “The main problem with the West, until now it never understood how the Syrian regime works. Whenever you threaten them you won’t get anything.”
“The Joint O.P.C.W.-U.N. mission has inspected 21 of the 23 sites declared by Syria, and 39 of the 41 facilities located at those sites,” the statement said. “The two remaining sites were not visited due to safety and security concerns. But Syria declared those sites as abandoned and that the chemical weapons program items they contained were moved to other declared sites, which were inspected.” Mr. Assad’s opponents have bitterly denounced the accord as a distraction, and they were dismayed that the chemical weapons attack in August that American officials say killed 1,400 men, women and children near Damascus led not to American military intervention, as President Obama initially threatened, but to an agreement that allows Mr. Assad’s supporters to portray him as a statesman.
“The joint mission is now satisfied that it has verified — and seen destroyed — all of Syria’s declared critical production and mixing/filling equipment,” it added. “Given the progress made, no further inspection activities are currently planned.” The deal also created a de facto expectation that Mr. Assad would remain in office at least until mid-2014, when the elimination of the weapons is supposed to be complete under the agreement, critics say. And Syrians — supporters and opponents of the government alike — widely considered chemical weapons a side issue that global leaders were focusing on, rather than finding ways to end the war and its humanitarian disaster.
The group said Syria had met the deadline set by the group’s executive council, which had urged the destruction of production and other equipment no later than Friday. The government’s international opponents emphasized on Thursday that the deal was still incomplete and that they still hold Mr. Assad accountable for the suffering of Syrians. The British Foreign Office said in a statement that while the destruction of chemical facilities was “an important first milestone, it brings no relief to the Syrian people,” since the government continues to use artillery, air power and “siege tactics” against civilians.
According to an inventory of Syria’s chemical weapons program reported by the agency to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, the facilities that have been destroyed since inspectors started work at the beginning of October include 18 production facilities, eight mobile filling units and three other “chemical weapons-related” facilities. In a statement on Thursday, the international chemical weapons watchdog group, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, said Syria had disabled all of the chemical weapons production and mixing facilities it declared to inspectors, rendering them inoperable, ahead of the deadline of Friday.
“It was a smash-and-grab operation that didn’t need high-tech anything,” Michael Luhan, a spokesman for the chemical weapons group, said in a telephone interview. The organization said that its inspectors and United Nations officials had visited 39 of the 41 facilities at 21 of the 23 sites that Syria had declared to them. While the two remaining sites — where chemical weapons are developed, stored and tested — were too hazardous to visit because of fighting, chemical-making equipment had been moved to other sites that the inspectors could visit, the statement said.
Syria agreed to the destruction of its chemical arsenal to avert threatened American and French military strikes after a poison gas attack in a suburb of Damascus, the Syrian capital, on Aug. 21 that killed hundreds of people. “The joint mission is now satisfied that it has verified — and seen destroyed — all of Syria’s declared critical production and mixing/filling equipment,” the weapons organization’s statement said. “Given the progress made, no further inspection activities are currently planned.”
The United States and its allies backing Syria’s rebels accused forces loyal to Mr. Assad of responsibility for the attack. Mr. Assad blamed the rebels themselves. In Washington, at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, questions were raised about why only 23 sites were mentioned in the statement as opposed to the 45 that American officials had said existed. Thomas M. Countryman, the State Department’s assistant secretary for international security and nonproliferation, said that the discrepancy might stem from how sites were defined, but that other details were classified and that there would be a subsequent hearing on the matter.
The next phase of the timetable set down by the United Nations is Syria’s destruction of its stockpiles of chemical weapons by mid-2014. Disarmament experts have said the large number of weapons makes the deadline for their destruction a major challenge. The weapons organization’s statements throughout the process have consistently suggested that the Syrian government was putting up no apparent resistance. Some government supporters — and indeed, some rebel fighters — have criticized the deal as giving up weapons that belong to the Syrian people and are needed as a deterrent against Israel, which maintains an undeclared nuclear arsenal.
Syria’s arsenal has about 1,000 metric tons of Category 1 chemical weapons, according to the agency’s report to Mr. Ban last week. These include sarin, which the United States said was used in the Aug. 21 attack; VX nerve agent; and sulfur mustard. Ahmet Uzumcu, the head of the organization, said Syria also had about 290 metric tons of Category 2 chemical weapons, which are believed to be mostly precursor chemicals, and 1,230 munitions for delivering chemical weapons that had yet to be filled. But Syrian officials said that the weapons were of little practical use and that giving them up allowed them to claim new moral standing and draw attention to the push for the elimination of Israel’s nuclear weapons.
On the positive side, Mr. Uzumcu said most of the Category 1 weapons were binary precursor chemicals that would need to be combined to become active agents. These will be safer to transport out of the country and easier to destroy. That situation and the absence of loaded chemical munitions — which need more permanent structures, like blast containment chambers, for their destruction — greatly simplifies the task facing Syria and the watchdog group, Mr. Luhan said. They have blamed the rebels for the deadly chemical attacks while independent experts analyzing a United Nations report on the attacks have said the evidence points to government culpability and to the weapons having been fired from government bases overlooking Damascus.
“It makes the deadline immediately much more doable,” he said. The big issue will be what is going to be moved out of the country, and where, he said. In a recent interview in Damascus, the deputy foreign minister, Fayssal Mekdad, portrayed the Syrian government as restrained and pragmatic.
Syria has submitted proposals to destroy the arsenal to the organization, which has yet to approve them. The executive council must approve the plan by Nov. 15, the statement said. “We behaved responsibly against a potential attack by the U.S., which could really endanger the situation in Syria and in the region and beyond,” he said. “We have fulfilled our responsibility. It shows once again the success of Syrian diplomacy and the care it gives to the interests of the people and the region and world peace.”
The organization has not specified the locations of the sites that inspectors were not able to visit on their mission, which illustrated the perils of operating in a war zone where some places are under siege and battle lines shift unpredictably. He added that those concerned about nuclear and chemical weapons in the Middle East “should only focus their eyes on the Israeli arsenal.”
Mr. Luhan said in an earlier interview that one of the sites was near Damascus, in the south, and the other near Aleppo, in the north. News reports say government forces have bombarded the northern town of Safira in recent weeks to try to dislodge rebels, including Islamist fighters linked to Al Qaeda. On Thursday, the Israeli newspaper Maariv reported that senior Israeli officials had met in Switzerland recently with representatives of all the Arab states to discuss holding a conference on disarming weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. It was the first time Arab and Israeli officials had met to discuss such a proposal, Maariv said.
“Access to both sites would be extremely risky,” Mr. Luhan said. The article quoted “American sources” as saying the United States would not pressure Israel to give up its nuclear weapons before reaching a deal with Iran over its nuclear program, which Iran says is peaceful but which Israel believes is aimed at building nuclear weapons.
In its statement, the watchdog group also reported that eight inspectors had returned to its headquarters after spending a month in Damascus as part of an advance team that arrived there on Oct. 1. Mr. Uzumcu praised their “fortitude and courage” in “fulfilling the most challenging mission ever undertaken by this organization.”

Alan Cowell contributed reporting from London, and Nick Cumming-Bruce from Geneva.

Last week, the organization said it had 27 inspectors in Syria working in three teams, but that number will be reduced to 15 this week in staff rotations.
Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United States contributed $5.5 million to help finance the destruction program, the report said. It is not clear where the chemical weapons will be destroyed. Last week, Norway turned down an American request to destroy part of the arsenal.

Nick Cumming-Bruce contributed reporting from Geneva.