Syria has destroyed or rendered
inoperable all of its declared chemical weapons production and mixing
facilities, meeting a major deadline in an ambitious disarmament program, the
international chemical weapons watchdog said Thursday.
The Organization for the Prohibition of
Chemical Weapons, which won the Nobel Peace prize this month, said its teams
had inspected 21 out of 23 chemical weapons sites across the country. The other
two were too dangerous to inspect, but the chemical equipment had already been
moved to other sites that experts had visited, it said.
Syria "has completed the functional
destruction of critical equipment for all of its declared chemical weapons
production facilities and mixing/filling plants, rendering them
inoperable," it said, meeting a deadline to do so no later than Nov. 1.
The next deadline is Nov. 15, by when the
OPCW and Syria must agree to a detailed plan of destruction, including how and
where to destroy more than 1,000 metric tons of toxic agents and munitions.
Under a Russian-American brokered deal,
Damascus agreed to destroy all its chemical weapons after Washington threatened
to use force in response to the killing of hundreds of people in a sarin attack
on the outskirts of Damascus on Aug. 21.
It was the world's deadliest chemical
weapons incident since Saddam Hussein's forces used poison gas against the
Kurdish town of Halabja 25 years ago.
The United States and its allies blamed
Assad's forces for the attack and several earlier incidents. The Syrian
president has rejected the charge, blaming rebel brigades.
Under the disarmament timetable, Syria was
due to render unusable all production and chemical weapons filling facilities
by Nov. 1 - a target it has now met. By mid-2014 it must have destroyed its
entire stockpile of chemical weapons.
The OPCW mission is being undertaken in the
midst of Syria's 2-1/2 year civil war, which has killed more than 100,000
people. The unprecedented conditions had raised concerns that the violence
would impede the disarmament, but the OPCW says Syrian authorities have been
cooperating with the weapons experts, who have been able to visit all but three
of the chemical sites.
Syrian authorities said that "the
chemical weapons program items removed from these sites were moved to other
declared sites", an OPCW document said.
Separately, a series of explosions hit an air base on Thursday in the
western province of Latakia, a regime stronghold, according to the Syrian
Observatory for Human Rights.
The Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman said that the cause
of the explosions is "unclear" and that no casualties have been
reported. A Syrian security source meanwhile told Agence France Presse
that "a rocket fell near the base, causing a fire to break out."
Latakia is a stronghold of Syrian President Bashar Assad's
regime, and is home to a large number of Alawites, who belong to the same
minority Shiite sect as the country's embattled ruler.
On another note,
a Polish journalist who was taken hostage by Islamist militants in northwest Syria in July managed to escape and has safely returned home, local media reported on Thursday.
REUTERS/LBCI