Chemical weapons stockpile tackled
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International inspectors began destroying Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons and the machinery used to create it, a United Nations official said yesterday, racing under a tight deadline aiming to eliminate President Bashar Assad’s chemical weapons arsenal in nine months.
The move kicks off an ambitious program, prompted by a chemical weapons attack in mid-August that killed hundreds of civilians on the outskirts of Damascus, that brought a rare consensus at the UN.
Under a Security Council resolution in September, the first stage is to destroy Syria’s capability to produce chemical weapons by November 1.
The UN official said that by last night, a combination of both weapons and some production equipment would be put out of order.
“Today is the first day of the phase of destruction and disabling. Verification will also continue,” he said.
An advance team of disarmament experts from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons arrived in Syria earlier this month to set up the broader operation to dismantle and ultimately destroy the chemical arsenal, believed to include some 1,000 tons of toxic agents.
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