NICOSIA: Syria maintains an arsenal of chemical weapons that is considered one of the biggest in the Middle East, but its makeup and size remain guesswork as few facts have emerged.
Britain, France and the United States have accused the Syrian regime of having unleashed poisonous gas against its civilians in Damascus suburbs on August 21 that killed hundreds.
US Secretary of State John Kerry said Washington has proof the regime of President Bashar Al Assad used sarin, a lethal nerve gas that kills in minutes developed by Nazi scientists in 1938.
France said yesterday it will soon declassify secret defence documents detailing Syria’s chemical arsenal in defiance of international conventions.
A government source made the comment after the Journal du Dimanche weekly said French intelligence agents had compiled information showing that some of the weapons had been stockpiled for nearly 30 years. The arsenal included over 1,000 tonnes of chemical agents, the paper said.
“The citations from the notes are correct,” the source said. “The government plans to make public the declassified documents on the Syrian chemical arms programme.” According to the Sunday newspaper, the arsenal included sarin and mustard gas. The secret documents showed that Syrian scientists had also worked to develop a powerful agent that was far more toxic that sarin.
Syria has denied unleashing chemical gas and blamed rebels fighting to topple Assad’s regime. Key ally Russia also said last month it has proof that rebel fighters had employed sarin nerve gas in March near Aleppo, in northern Syria.
The Syrian regime acknowledged for the first time on July 23, 2012, that it had chemical weapons and threatened to use them in case of a Western military intervention, but never against the Syrian population.
Syria is one of the few countries not to have signed the Chemical Weapons Convention and is believed to have a large stockpile of sarin and other nerve gases. The Syrian programme was launched in the 1970s with the help of Egypt and the then Soviet Union.
In the 1990s, Russia provided support, followed by Iran since 2005, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), an independent organisation tracking data on weapons of mass destruction.
An analyst at the non-proliferation and disarmament programme of the International Institute for Strategic Studies says Syria has the biggest chemical weapons programme in the Middle East, launched with the goal of counterbalancing Israel’s nuclear programme.
The analyst says important information on the programme has been collected following the defection of several Syrian military officers, but that the information is “far” from complete.
According to a specialist at the Monterey Institute for International Studies in the United States, Syria has “hundreds of tonnes” of diverse chemical agents. A French specialist at the Foundation for Strategic Research said: “Their armoury of chemical agents is quite strong.
“The Syrians have managed to master the synthesis of organophosphorus, that’s the last generation, the most efficient and most toxic of chemical weapons. In this family, one finds sarin and VX, as well as ... mustard gas,” he said in July 2012. AFP
