SyriaAssad retains secret caches of chemical weapons: Israeli intelligence

Despite committing to dismantle and give up its chemical weapons – Syria was in possession of the world’s largest chemical weapons stock — President Bashar al-Assad’s regime still maintains a “residual” chemical weapons capacity, consisting of a few tons of the proscribed materials.

Israel’s intelligence community has concluded that the Assad regime has decided to keep this reduced, but still formidable, chemical weapons capability, and has successfully concealed it from the inspectors of the UN chemical weapons watchdog who, a few weeks ago, have declared the chemical disarmament of Syria to be officially complete.

The process of destroying and removing Syria’s chemical weapons began almost a year ago, following international pressure on the Assad regime in the wake of the August 2013 sarin gas attack by Assad forces on a Damascus suburb, an attack which left more than 1,400 dead.

The August 2013 attack was the latest in a series of smaller chemical weapons attacks by Assad’s army on civilians in rebel-held areas, attacks which began in December 2012. Haaretz notes that these early incidents were more or less ignored, and certainly not taken seriously, by the United States and other Western countries. The Israeli intelligence community provided the United States with evidence for a few of these early instances of chemical weapons use – and the head of Israel’s military intelligence referred to these attack in one or two public presentations – but the Obama administration dismissed those claims. President Obama had publicly drawn a “red line” with regard to the use of chemical weapons by Assad, and the administration saw the earlier use of chemical weapons by Assad as too small and localized to trigger a U.S. military retaliation which the president’s red line references promised.

The administration’s attitude changed after the large-scale August 2013 attack, which was too large, and too close to the Syrian capital and the international media representatives there, to ignore.

The United States geared up for a limited retaliatory attack on Assad’s military installations, but the attack was called off at the last minute after a U.S.-Russian agreement to disarm Syria of its chemical weapons, which Assad was forced to accept.

In the following months, about 1,000 tons of different types of chemical weapons and weapons-related chemical materials and precursors were removed from Syria, and a dozen or so chemical weapons production facilities destroyed, under the supervision of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). In July, OPCW announced the process has been successfully completed.

Still, Israel has concluded that Assad has kept secret caches of chemical weapons, kept in Alawaite-dominated areas in northwest Syria. Haaretz reports that these secret caches are estimated to hold between several hundred kilograms and a few tons, or about 1 percent of what was Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal.

A senior Israeli defense official told Haaretz that the OPCW-supervised effort to remove Syria’s chemical weapons and destroy the country’s chemical weapons production capability were “a non-negligible achievement carried out without the use of force.” Still, he added, Israel has good reasons to believe that Syria still has small quantity of chemical weapons, and the American intelligence community does not dispute this assessment.

Israeli defense officials believe that these sarin gas weapons would likely be deployed if the Assad regime faced an imminent threat to its survival.

The newspaper notes that the Syrian regime is continuing to use chemical weapons which were not covered by the U.S.-Russian chemical weapons disarmament agreement, especially chlorine gas. The United States last month twice accused Assad of attacking Syrian rebels with chlorine gas, an a UN investigation earlier this month published its conclusions that the Syrian regime had used chlorine in attacks on rebel-held villages in April (see “UN report indicates Syrian army used chlorine in April attacks on rebel-held villages,” HSNW, 12 September 2014). Haaretz quotes Israeli military officials who said that employing chemical weapons is advantageous for the Assad regime, because these weapons allow the Syrian army to attack the rebels in tunnels and underground complexes without getting embroiled in close-range combat.