The removal of deadly toxins from Syria under an international effort to rid the nation of its chemical arsenal will likely miss a Dec. 31 deadline, the global chemical arms watchdog said.
Bad weather and shifting battlefronts in Syria's civil war have delayed the delivery of essential supplies to sites where the toxins are being prepared to be sent to Latakia port, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said.
"A delay will probably occur," Franz Krawinkler, the OPCW's logistics head told Austrian ORF state television on Saturday.
"Because of various external influences, including the weather... certain logistical supplies that are needed for this transport, could not be delivered in time."
Syria has agreed to abandon its chemical weapons by next June under a deal proposed by Russia and hashed out with the United States, after an Aug. 21 sarin gas attack that Western nations blamed on President Bashar al-Assad's government.
Damascus agreed to transport the "most critical" chemicals, including around 20 tons of mustard nerve agent, out of the northern port of Latakia by Dec. 31 to be safely destroyed abroad away from the war zone.
A Russian diplomat was also quoted as saying on Friday that the deadline would be missed because the toxins that can be used to make sarin, VX gas and other agents still faced a potentially hazardous trip to the port of Latakia.
"The removal has not yet begun," Russia's RIA news agency quoted Mikhail Ulyanov as saying after an international meeting on the chemical arms removal effort.
Russia, which has given Assad crucial support during the nearly three-year-old civil conflict in Syria, airlifted 75 armoured vehicles and trucks to the nation last week to carry chemicals to Latakia.
Syrian government forces took control of a key highway connecting Damascus to the coast earlier this month, but Ulyanov said the trip could still be treacherous.
"They will have to be taken on dangerous roads, there are several dangerous stretches," RIA quoted Ulyanov, head of the Foreign Ministry's disarmament department, as saying.
On the field:
A Syrian army air strike on a vegetable market in the northern city of Aleppo killed at least 25 people on Saturday, a monitoring group said, continuing a campaign of improvised "barrel bombs" that has drawn international condemnation.
A video posted on the Internet by local activist group Insaan Rights Watch showed residents pulling mangled corpses out of scorched and twisted car frames.
One road hit by the strike was covered with debris from nearby buildings and was lined with bodies, as young men shouted for cars to help transport the wounded. The content of the video could not be independently verified.
Hundreds of people have been killed by air raids around the city of Aleppo in recent weeks, scores of them women and children, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a pro-opposition monitoring group based in Britain.
On Saturday, the Observatory said 25 people, at least four of them children, were killed by barrel bombing that also destroyed part of a hospital. It said the death toll was likely to rise as dozens more were wounded in the attack.
Syrian authorities say they are battling rebels controlling large portions of the city, once Syria's business hub.
Human rights groups and the United States have condemned the use of the improvised bombs - oil drums or cylinders which are packed with explosives and metal fragments, often rolled out of an aircraft's cargo bay. They say it is an indiscriminate form of bombardment.
REUTERS/AP