Damascus (AFP) - Experts destroyed missile warheads, aerial bombs and chemical mixing equipment Sunday on the first day of a campaign to eliminate Syria's chemical weapons, the UN said.
The operation, performed by Syrian personnel under the supervision of international disarmament experts, took place under the terms of a UN Security Council resolution that will see Damascus relinquish the banned arms.
Workers "used cutting torches and angle grinders to destroy or disable a range of items", said a statement released by the United Nations and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).
The Syrian workers were destroying or disabling a "range of items", including "missile warheads, aerial bombs and mixing and filling equipment", the statement added.
The team faces the daunting task of disposing of an estimated 1,000 tonnes of the nerve agent sarin, mustard gas and other banned arms at dozens of sites in Syria by mid-2014.
The experts, who arrived on Tuesday, were also "monitoring, verifying and reporting" whether Assad's government provided accurate information on its chemical stockpiles.
As the operation got under way, President Bashar al-Assad admitted in an interview that his government had made "mistakes" in the country's brutal conflict.
I have to agree that this is great news. Too bad that Sadam didn't want to take the same deal. Asad had to know that his fate was going to be similar to Sadam's if he didn't do something reasonable.
ReplyDeleteStormcloud,
DeleteI don't know. I'll be skeptical for a while. Probably a long while. The adage about something being too good to be true . . .
Jean
Sadam had WMDs??? Say it ain't so.
ReplyDeleteThe international OPCW announced that the dismantling of Syrian chemical weapons has begun. The inspectors who arrived in Damascus last Tuesday said the job was being performed by…Syrian military teams. In Indonesia, US Secretary of State John Kerry fulsomely praised the Assad regime for its compliance with the UN resolution - the first kind word from an American official in nearly three years. However, according to DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources, nothing more than the token disarming of a few chemical bombs and shells has taken place. Neither the UN nor the OPCW have the manpower or the equipment for dismantling Assad’s chemical arsenal, and so the inspectors were forced to trust Assad’s army to keep the showing going.
ReplyDeletehttp://media.calvaryftl.org/player/?fn=G5649
ReplyDeleteIm not sure if that link will work, but its a Messianic Jew captain in the IDF with some rather unheard parts of the dialogue between the Obama and Asaad regimes.
Specifically he talks about how the Obama administration contacted Asaad and told him that all the shit storm about to befall him over the sarin gas attack is just brinksmanship and America had no interest in toppling him.
You be the judge.