Syria on Monday finished handing over to Western powers the 1,300 tonnes of chemical weapons it acknowledged having, completing a deal reached last fall under threat of US airstrikes.
The most dangerous material will be transferred to a US ship, which will move into international waters and use specialized equipment to destroy the chemicals over the next two months. Other material will be disposed of at toxic waste sites in various countries.
Questions persist over whether Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is hiding undeclared poison gases or attacking rebels with chlorine, a toxic industrial gas not specifically classified as a chemical weapon.
Yet politicians and activists hailed Monday’s milestone as a victory for international diplomacy and, at the least, a clear reduction in the amount of chemicals available for use in Syria’s civil war.
The material handed over by Damascus included mustard gas and precursors to nerve gas sarin.
Syria agreed to give up its arsenal when the US threatened missile strikes in retaliation for a chemical attack on a rebel-held suburb of the capital that is believed to have killed more than 1,000 people.
The deal was put together by the US and Moscow, which has been al-Assad’s most powerful international backer during the war.
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said the final 100 tonnes of chemicals were loaded onto a ship in the Syria’s Latakia port.
The handover came nearly two months after the April 27 deadline set by the UN, which the organization attributed to security concerns amid the persistent fighting.
“The last thing you want, of course, is when you’re dealing with chemical weapons elimination, that chemical weapons material falls into the wrong hands,” Sigrid Kaag, head of the joint UN-OPCW mission in Syria, said at the project’s staging ground in Cyprus.
“I can’t say ... that Syria doesn’t have any chemical weapons anymore,” OPCW director-general Ahmet Uzumcu said, but he added that that was true of any country that his organization works with.
Kaag said her team “are working closely with the Syrian Republic to look at any discrepancies or any revisions” in Syria’s declaration.
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