Syria and weapons of mass destruction

Syria and weapons of mass destruction deals with the research, manufacture, stockpiling and alleged use by Syria of weapons of mass destruction, which include chemical and nuclear weapons.

On 14 September 2013, the United States and Russia announced an agreement for the elimination of Syria's chemical weapon stockpiles by June 2014. In October 2013, the OPCW-UN Joint Mission destroyed all of Syria's declared chemical weapons manufacturing and mixing equipment. Several months later, Syria disclosed that it maintained a ricin chemical weapons program, which the Syrian government claims has fallen into the hands of Syrian Opposition forces in the east of the country. The following month Syria, further disclosed that it had 4 more previously hidden chemical weapons production sites. The Israeli intelligence community believes the Syrian government retains several tons of chemical weapons.

Syria sought to develop nuclear weapons with help from North Korea, but its plutonium production reactor was destroyed by the Israeli Air Force in 2007 (see Operation Orchard). The Syria file at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) remains open, amid Syria's failure to respond to the IAEA's questions about the destroyed facility, that the IAEA concluded was "very likely" a nuclear reactor, including the whereabouts of the reactor's nuclear fuel. In January 2015, it was reported that the Syrian government is suspected to be building a nuclear plant in Al-Qusayr, Syria.

Background

Following the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights during the 1967 Six-Day War, and South Lebanon in 1978, the Syrian government has regarded Israeli military power as a threat to Syrian security. Syria first acquired chemical weapons from Egypt in 1973 as a military deterrent against Israel before launching the Yom Kippur War. Despite the fact that Syrian officials did not explicitly declare the chemical weapons capability, they implied it through speeches and in addition warned of retaliations. Internal Syrian chemical weapons capability may have been developed with indirect Russian, German, Chinese technical and logistical support. It is likely Syria imported dual-use chemical weapon precursors and production equipment from West Europe, China and North Korea.

In 1997, security analyst Zuhair Diab, who worked for the Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a diplomat from 1981 to 1985, wrote that Israeli nuclear weapons were a primary motivation for the Syrian chemical weapons program. Their rivalry with Iraq and Turkey were also important considerations.

On 23 July 2012 Syria implicitly confirmed it possessed a stockpile of chemical weapons which it says are reserved for national defense against foreign countries.

During the Syrian Civil War, in August 2012, the Syrian military restarted chemical weapons testing at a base on the outskirts of Aleppo. Chemical weapons were a major point of discussion between the Syrian government and world leaders, with military intervention being considered by the West as a potential consequence of the use of such weapons.

Chemical weapons

Syria's chemical weapons program

Syria's chemical weapons program began in the 1970s with weapons and training from Egypt and the Soviet Union, with production of chemical weapons in Syria beginning in the mid-1980s. In the July 2007 Syrian arms depot explosion, there were suggestions that the incident involved a secret chemical weapons facility.

Prior to September 2013 Syria was one of a handful of states which had not ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention, and had not publicly admitted to possessing chemical weapons, although Western intelligence services believed it to hold a massive stockpile.Congressional Research Service, 12 September 2013
Syria's Chemical Weapons: Issues for Congress
In September 2013, French intelligence put the Syrian stockpile at 1,000 tonnes, including Yperite, VX and "several hundred tonnes of sarin". After international condemnation of the August 2013 Ghouta chemical attack, for which Western states held the Syrian government responsible (whilst Syria and Russia held the Syrian rebels of the Syrian civil war responsible), in September 2013 Syria joined the Convention (formally acceding on 14 October), as part of its agreement to the destruction of its chemical weapons under the supervision of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. In October 2013, the OPCW found a total of 1,300 tons of chemical weapons.

On 16 October 2013, the OPCW and the United Nations formally established a joint mission to oversee the elimination of the Syrian chemical weapons program by mid-2014, which was declared completed in January 2016. According to Reuters, a chemical analysis done in January 2018 on the destroyed stockpile samples match some chemical markers such as hexamine, unique to the Syrian recipe for sarin, with samples from the 21 August 2013 Ghouta attack and also from interviewees' samples from Khan Sheikhoun and Khan Al-Assal attack sites.

Syrian opposition chemical weapons capability

The Syrian government claims that the opposition has the capacity to launch large chemical attacks such as those seen at Ghouta. Sources such as the United States and Human Rights Watch disagree, claiming there is no significant evidence the opposition has any significant chemical weapons capability.

A Syrian military source told SANA, the official news agency in Syria, that the Syrian Army seized two containers with sarin together with automatic rifles, pistols and homemade bombs (IEDs) in a rebel hideout in the al-Faraieh neighborhood (also spelled Al-Faraya) of the city of Hama on 1 June 2013, which has been the scene of fighting between government troops and armed opposition groups. The Syrian government declared the two cylinders "as abandoned chemical weapons" and told the OPCW that "the items did not belong to" them. On 14 June 2014, the Joint OPCW-UN Mission confirmed that the cylinders contained sarin. On 7 July 2014, the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon informed the UN Security Council about the findings.

In December 2013 investigative journalist Seymour Hersh controversially reported that multiple U.S. intelligence agencies had allegedly produced top secret assessments in the summer of 2013, regarding Syrian rebel's supposed chemical weapons capabilities. The alleged assessments were said by Hersh to have concluded that the Al-Nusra Front and Al-Qaeda in Iraq were capable of acquiring, producing, and deploying sarin gas "in quantity". A spokesman for the Director of National Intelligence replied that Hersh's report was "simply false."

On 8 April 2016, a spokesman for the rebel group said that "weapons not authorized for use in these types of confrontations" had been used against Kurdish militia and civilians in the Sheikh Maqsood neighborhood in Aleppo. He stated that "One of our commanders has unlawfully used a type of weapon that is not included in our list". He did not specify what substances were used but, according to the Kurdish Red Crescent, the symptoms were consistent with the use of chlorine gas or other agents. Welat Memo, a physician with the Kurdish Red Crescent, said that the people affected are "vomiting and having difficulty in breathing." Jaysh al-Islam subsequently clarified that it was referring to "modified Grad rockets," not chemical weapons.

ISIS mustard gas use

The BBC reported in September 2015 that, according to an unnamed U.S. official, the U.S. believes that ISIS had used powdered mustard agent at least four times in Syria and Iraq, that ISIS had probably manufactured the mustard agent itself, and probably had an active chemical weapons research team. Mustard agent is a relatively simple chemical weapon to manufacture, and given the Syrian government's chemical-weapons disarmament, analysts deemed it unlikely that ISIS had acquired the mustard agent from seizing a Syrian government cache. The BBC further stated that a BBC team on the Turkey-Syria border had seen corroborating evidence.

Biological weapons

Syria is generally considered not to have biological weapons.
However, there are some reports of an active biological weapons research and production program. According to NATO Consultant Dr Jill Dekker, Syria has worked on: anthrax, plague, tularemia, botulism, smallpox, aflatoxin, cholera, ricin and camelpox, and has used Russian help in installing anthrax in missile warheads. She also stated "they view their bio-chemical arsenal as part of a normal weapons program".

Nuclear program

Syria has been a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) since 24 September 1969, and has a limited civil nuclear program. In 1991 China sold a miniature neutron source reactor called SRR-1 to Syria. Before the start of the Syrian Civil War Syria was known to operate only the Chinese reactor. Despite claiming to be a proponent of a Weapons of Mass Destruction Free Zone (WMDFZ) in the Middle East (Syria has not handed a letter confirming its support for WMDFZ), Syria was accused of pursuing a military nuclear program with a reported nuclear facility in a desert Syrian region of Deir ez-Zor. The reactor's components were believed to have been designed and manufactured in North Korea, with the reactor's striking similarity in shape and size to the North Korean Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center. The nuclear reactor was still under construction.

That information alarmed Israeli military and intelligence to such a degree that the idea of a targeted airstrike was conceived, resulting in Operation Outside the Box

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