Diplomacy

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Assad’s Desperation Could Prompt Syria to Unleash Prohibited Chemical Weapons

by TheTower.org Staff |

The desperation of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad could prompt him to increase the regime’s use of chemical weapons, The Wall Street Journal reported (Google link) yesterday, citing sources in the American government.

Last year, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad let international inspectors oversee the removal of what President Barack Obama called the regime’s most deadly chemical weapons. The deal averted U.S. airstrikes that would have come in retaliation for an Aug. 21, 2013, sarin-gas attack that killed more than 1,400 people.

Since then, the U.S. officials said, the Assad regime has developed and deployed a new type of chemical bomb filled with chlorine, which Mr. Assad could now decide to use on a larger scale in key areas. U.S. officials also suspect the regime may have squirreled away at least a small reserve of the chemical precursors needed to make nerve agents sarin or VX. Use of those chemicals would raise greater international concerns because they are more deadly than chlorine and were supposed to have been eliminated.

U.S. officials fear that Assad “could use those chemicals as a weapon of last resort to protect key installations, or if the regime felt it had no other way to defend the core territory of its most reliable supporters, the Alawites.”

In August 2013, the Assad regime killed hundreds of civilians in a chemical attack on a Damascus suburb. Despite a deal drawn up in the wake of this attack to rid Syria of its chemical weapon stockpile, the Assad regime has continued to use chlorine gas, and last month traces of chemical weapons were found at facilities that Assad had not declared. Earlier this year, Iran attempted to block diplomatic efforts to condemn Syria for its violation of the chemical weapons agreement it had signed.

In April, an editorial in the Journal argued that if Russian protection allowed Assad to violate the chemical weapons agreement he signed with impunity, we could expect “more of the same after the same governments celebrate a nuclear deal with Iran.”

[Photo: ABC News / YouTube ]

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