SyriaSyria is continuing to use chemical weapons against its people: Diplomats

Published 2 December 2015

Diplomats attending the annual meeting of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague, on Monday accused Syrian president Bashar al-Assad of continuing to use deadly gas munitions against his own people, although Syria committed to dismantle and remove all of its stocks of chemical weapons. U.S. and EU representatives charged that the regime may still has in its possession large quantities of chemical armaments like sulfur mustard and sarin, which it has concealed from international inspectors.

Diplomats attending the annual meeting of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague, on Monday accused Syrian president Bashar al-Assad of continuing to use deadly gas munitions against his own people, although Syria committed to dismantle and remove all of its stocks of chemical weapons.

Foreign Policy reports that U.S. and EU representatives charged that the regime may still has in its possession large quantities of chemical armaments like sulfur mustard and sarin, which it has concealed from international inspectors.

Rafael Foley, the U.S. representative to OPCW, said that “chemical weapons use is becoming routine in the Syrian civil war,” and the “one conclusion” to be drawn from reports out of Syria is “the Syrian regime has continued to use chemical weapons on its own people.”

EU representative Jacek Bylica said that there are many “uncertainties regarding the dismantling of Syria’s chemical weapons program, notably the gaps and contradictions contained in Syria’s declarations.” Continued allegations of chemical attacks by the regime over the last year, he said, make it “impossible to have confidence” that Syria has actually dismantled the long-running program.

Foreign Policynotes that Bylica’s comments come against the backdrop of several ongoing international investigation into a series of alleged strikes over the past year, including evidence of a lethal gas attack on the Syrian village of Sarmin in March.

Earlier this year, U.S. officials have said that they were confident in evidence that showed that ISIS used mustard gas against Kurdish forces in August. In January, ISIS attacked Kurdish forces with chlorine gas, leading the Kurds to request that Washington send gas masks for their troops, but only about 300 have arrived thus far ( see “More evidence emerges of ISIS’s use of chemical weapons,” HSNW, 27 July 2015).

Following an agreement reached after the Assad regime used sarin gas to kill more than 1,200 civilians in a Sunni neighborhood of Damascus, Syria has turned over 1,300 tons of chemical weapons materials, and OPCW says about 99 percent of that has been destroyed.

The Assad regime, however, continued to use chemical weapons against Sunni civilian targets, even if on a smaller scale, leading OPCW to team up with the UN to establish an investigative team to look into Syrian violations. The team’s report is due to be handed over to the Security Council in February.