Deep dive into the Syrian chemical program

The veil which for a long time masked the program of chemical weapons production of the Syrian regime, allowing it to escape its commitments vis-à-vis the international community in this area, begins to tear itself apart. On Monday, October 19, two NGOs at the forefront of the fight against impunity in the Syrian conflict, Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI) and Syrian Archive, submitted to several national and international investigative bodies a report of depth and of unprecedented precision on the operation of this program, which has caused the death of hundreds of civilians since 2011.

This 90-page document, including The world, the Washington post, the Financial Times and the Süddeutsche Zeitung obtained an exclusive copy, reveals how the authorities in Damascus played with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the body believed to have dismantled the Syrian chemical arsenal.

The report is based on the analysis of open sources, on the use of data extracted from a United Nations register and above all on the testimonies of some fifty Syrian officials who have defected in recent years. Most were employees of the Center for Scientific Studies and Research (CERS), the state body responsible for the development of Syrian conventional and unconventional armaments, which gives their words particularly valuable value.

These sources depict the architecture, until then little known, of this military-industrial complex and describe the stratagems deployed by the Syrian power to mislead the OPCW sleuths and maintain an offensive capacity in the chemical field: transfer of a part of the stockpile of weapons and lethal substances in the bases of the Republican Guard, the regime’s elite unit; stalking, incarceration and, in some cases, disposal of employees deemed “dubious”; and establishment of a secret channel for the importation of products entering into the composition of nerve agents, such as sarin.

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It was this substance that had been used one night in August 2013 against Ghouta, the rebellious suburb of Damascus, leading to the death by suffocation of 1,200 of its inhabitants. The indignation aroused by this attack, an obscene violation of the “red line” drawn by the then American president, Barack Obama, had led the United States, France and the United Kingdom to prepare retaliatory bombings. But, due to a last-minute arrangement between Washington and Moscow, this military intervention project had been suspended.

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