Syria“Strong possibility” Assad may use chemical weapons on a large scale to protect regime: U.S. intelligence

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.

U.S., European, and Israeli intelligence services say that after the most toxic chemicals were removed and more than a dozen chemical weapons 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.

A new analysis by the U.S. intelligence community suggests Assad could use these chemical weapons as a weapon of last resort to protect key military and regime installations, or if the regime felt it had no other way to defend the core territory of its most reliable supporters, the Alawites.

The analysis underlines what U.S. officials describe as growing signs of the Assad regime’s desperation on the battlefield.

Since January, moderate rebels — some backed by the CIA — and Islamic State militants have been pushing the Syrian military out of areas controlled by the regime, leaving critical military bases, strategic roads, and supply lines vulnerable, particularly in the country’s northwest, south, and in the Kalamoun mountain range which straddles the Syria-Lebanon border.

A worst-case scenario, the U.S. officials said, would be an open war between Islamists and Alawite-dominated communities near the Mediterranean coast, the home territory of the Alawites, the religious minority to which Assad belongs.

An additional worry, analysts say, is that the disintegration of the Syrian military has led not only to hasty retreats by Syrian units from important military bases in the country’s north, east, and south – but often to disorderly and panicky retreats, in which advanced weapon systems were abandoned, only to be seized by the anti-regime rebels. If the regime chemical weapons are not better guarded, there is a risk that they, too, will fall into rebels’ hands as the rebels continue to whittle away at territory held by the regime.