Did Syria hide part of its chemical arsenal from the inspectors of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)? Or has it reconstituted its stocks after their destruction announced in the summer of 2014? Both, suggests the confidential report of the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI) and Syrian Archive, filed Monday, October 19 on the office of French, German and American prosecutors and on that of investigators of the OPCW.
In April 2020, the latter confirmed the responsibility of the Syrian army in three offensives using sarin gas and chlorine perpetrated at the end of March 2017 against the town of Latamné, in the north of the country. “These confirmations automatically imply that parts of the chemical weapons program are still active and that all materials have not been declared. [par la Syrie] in the past “, says Jean-Pascal Zanders, chemical weapons specialist and researcher associated with the Foundation for Strategic Research (FRS).
Following this investigation, the member states of the OPCW on July 9 gave Syria 90 days to report where the chemical weapons used in Latamne were found. “Developed, produced and stored”. In its response, in early October, Damascus denounced ” the blackmail “ and the “Pressures” exercised by France, the United Kingdom and the United States, seeing “A green light” to the terrorist groups to which Damascus attributes the chemical attacks.
“Inconsistencies” of Syrian declarations
Damascus joined the organization in September 2013, in the wake of the sarin massacre in Ghouta, a suburb of the Syrian capital, promising to destroy a chemical program built from the 1980s. The following month, the organization received the inventory of Syrian chemical stocks in the hands of Damascus: 1,300 tonnes of chemical agents, 27 sites comprising several production units and 1,260 munitions. The OPCW launched the largest disarmament operation ever undertaken during wartime.
In mid-August 2014, it announced the destruction of the Syrian chemical components, at least the part that the Assad regime had kindly declared. Because, in the spring of 2014, when an attack with a barrel of chlorine struck the town of Kafr-Zita in the center of the country, several states began to doubt Damascus’s good faith. Over the next six years, the Director General of the OPCW repeatedly denounced “Gaps, inconsistencies and deviations” noted in the Syrian declaration. And each time, Damascus’s response led to new questions and new inspections. The game of cat and mouse against a backdrop of the agony of a country.
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