Northern Storm brigade members, loyal to the Free Syrian Army, entering Syria’s northern city of Azaz.
THE HAGUE/BEIRUT: Syria gave details of some of its chemical weapons to a UN-backed arms watchdog at The Hague yesterday but needs to fill in gaps by next week to launch a rapid disarmament operation that may avert US air strikes.
At the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the agency which is to oversee the removal of President Bashar Al Assad’s arsenal, a spokeswoman said: “We have received part of the verification and we expect more.”
She did not say what was missing from a document one UN diplomat described as “quite long”. The OPCW’s 41-member Executive Council is due to meet early next week to review Syria’s inventory and to agree on implementing last week’s US-Russian deal to eliminate the entire arsenal in nine months.
The timetable was laid down by US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov a week ago in Geneva when they set aside sharp differences over Syria to agree on a plan to deprive Assad of chemical weapons and so remove the immediate threat from Washington of launching military action.
That plan set a rough deadline of today for Syria to give a full account of the weapons it possesses. Security experts say it has about 1,000 tonnes of mustard gas, VX and sarin — the nerve agent UN inspectors found after hundreds were killed by poison following missile strikes on rebel-held areas on August 21.
Kerry said he had spoken to Lavrov by telephone yesterday and agreed to continue cooperating, “moving not only towards the adoption of the OPCW rules and regulations, but also a resolution that is firm and strong within the United Nations”.
One Western diplomat warned that a failure by Assad to account for all the suspected stockpile would cause world powers to seek action at the UN Security Council to force him to.
The US State Department said it was studying the material: “Today was a step that we’re looking for in terms of an initial document,” said spokeswoman Marie Harf. “We will be taking a look at it and making an assessment ... An accurate list is vital to ensure the effective implementation.”
Once the OPCW executive has voted to follow the Lavrov-Kerry plan in a meeting expected early next week, the Security Council is due to give its endorsement of the arrangements — marking a rare consensus after two years of East-West deadlock over Syria.
On the ground in Syria, Al Qaeda-linked fighters and a unit of Syrian rebels yesterday declared a truce after two days of clashes in the town of Azaz near the Turkish frontier that highlighted divisions in the opposition, in which hardline groups are powerful.
The Northern Storm brigade, which is loyal to the Western-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) and was based in Azaz, agreed to the truce with Al Qaeda front group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), under which both sides pledged to observe a ceasefire, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The deal was brokered by Liwa Al Tawhid, a powerful rebel brigade loyal to the FSA, which sent fighters to the town on Thursday who have deployed between the two sides.
The rival groups also undertook to free detainees captured in the fighting and to immediately return any looted goods. Any future problems would be put to an arbitration committee, the Britain-based watchdog added.
The Syrian National Coalition, political exiles who work with FSA, accused the jihadist group of “aggression towards Syrian revolutionary forces and its indifference to the lives of the Syrian people”.
“ISIS no longer fights the Assad regime. Rather, it is strengthening its positions in liberated areas, at the expense of the safety of civilians,” it said in a statement, attacking the group for this week’s fighting at Azaz.
Hundreds of rebels, including entire brigades, have pledged allegiance to ISIS and its domestic branch the Nusra Front in northern and eastern Syria, activists and Islamist sources said yesterday.
Aid agencies raised the alarm yesterday about the break-up of Syria into pockets run by different factions.
At a Geneva news conference, Pierre Kraehenbuehl, director of operations for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said: “When colleagues of ours travel from Damascus to Aleppo, it is something between 50 and 60 checkpoints on the way.”
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