German Chancellor Angela Merkel (centre), with Nato-German troops at a Turkish military base in Kahramanmaras, close to the Syrian border, yesterday.
AMMAN: Syrian rebels have captured the site of a suspected nuclear reactor near the Euphrates river which Israeli warplanes destroyed six years ago, opposition sources in eastern Syria said yesterday.
Al Kubar site, around 60km west of the city of Deir Al Zor, became a focus of international attention when Israel raided it in 2007. The United States said the complex was a North Korean-designed nuclear reactor geared to making weapons-grade plutonium. Omar Abu Laila a spokesman for the Eastern Joint Command of the Free Syrian Army said the only building rebels found at the site was a hangar containing at least one Scud missile.
“It appears that the site was turned into a Scud launch base. Whatever structures it had have been buried,” he said, adding that three army helicopters airlifted the last loyalist troops before opposition fighters overran the area on Friday.
The Syrian military, which razed the site after the Israeli raid, said the complex was a regular military facility but refused to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency unrestrained access, after the agency said the complex could have been a nuclear site. The UN investigation appears to have died down since the national revolt against Preident Bashar Al Assad broke out in 2011, with the armed opposition increasingly capturing military sites in rural areas and on the edges of cities. UN inspectors examined the site in June 2008 but Syrian authorities has barred them access since.
Footage showed fighters inspecting the site and one large missile inside a hangar. One fighter pointed to what he said were explosives placed under the missile to destroy it before attacking forces got to it.
Abu Hamza, a commander in the Jafaar Al Tayyar brigade, said in a YouTube video taken at Kubar that various rebel groups, including the Al Qaeda linked Al-Nusra front, took part the operation and that UN inspectors were welcome to come and survey the site.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said yesterday that China and Russia were increasingly realising that President Bashar Al Assad’s time was up. Merkel, beginning a two-day trip to Turkey, said the missiles, provided at Nato member Turkey’s request, were a signal that the alliance would not tolerate Damascus dragging its neighbours into its conflict.
“In view of the terrible events the impression is mounting that China and Russia realise that Assad no longer has a future, that his time is up and that there must be a democratic government,” she told troops deployed to operate the missile batteries.
China and Russia, both permanent members of the UN Security Council, have blocked attempts by the West to mount pressure on Assad to end the violence in the nearly two-year-old conflict that has killed some 70,000 people.
Merkel said conflicts such as Syria’s ultimately need a political solution. She repeated her doubts about arming the Syrian opposition, noting weapons provided to Libyan rebels to assist their uprising had fallen into the wrong hands, and had ended up in use in fighting in Mali.
Reuters
