Syria was set to hand over a detailed plan for destroying its chemical arsenal yesterday, the international watchdog says, as a rebel attack near Damascus triggered power outages across the country.
However, prospects for a peace conference, which the UN is trying to convene in parallel with the disarmament process, looked dim after key opposition leaders spurned efforts by Western and Arab powers to persuade them to attend.
On the ground violence raged unabated on Wednesday, with rebels striking a gas pipeline that caused blackouts across Syria.
Photo: Reuters
A correspondent in Damascus said that he could see a huge fire blazing close to the airport, which is near the affected power station.
“A terrorist attack on a gas pipeline that feeds a power station in the south has led to a power outage in the provinces, and work to repair it is in progress,” state news agency SANA quoted Syrian Minister of Electricity Emad Khamis as saying.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that besides the Damascus region, power outages were reported in Aleppo and Homs.
“It is likely this was a large-scale operation planned well in advance,” Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman said.
Last month, a similar outage was caused after a high voltage power line was sabotaged.
Also on Wednesday, a car bomb hit a checkpoint in a western suburb of Damascus, causing multiple casualties among the troops manning it, the Observatory said, and rebels shelled two of Damascus’ main squares killing five people and wounding at least 22.
Meanwhile the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said that the Syrian government was expected to hand over its disarmament plan to them by yesterday.
The plan is the next step for Damascus under the terms of a US-Russian deal to head off military strikes on Syria that calls for all its chemical weapons and production facilities to be destroyed by the middle of next year.
“We expect Syria’s initial declaration of its chemical weapons program within the next 24 hours,” spokesman Michael Luhan told reporters on Wednesday in The Hague, where the OPCW is based.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime has already handed over an inventory of its chemicals, weapons and facilities, and a joint UN-OPCW team has been in Syria since the start of the month inspecting and destroying them.
The team has now checked 18 of 23 declared sites in Syria, destroying production equipment at almost all of them, Luhan said.
However, parallel efforts by the UN to convene a peace conference in Geneva next month have run into resistance from the opposition, who are insisting on a raft of preconditions.
Leaders of the National Coalition — the main opposition umbrella group — insisted they will not attend unless regime change and al-Assad’s departure are on the table.
A meeting in London on Tuesday between opposition leaders and 11 governments from the Friends of Syria group produced little more than a joint statement that al-Assad should play no future role in government.
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