US sees Assad’s fall as chance to destroy Syria’s chemical arsenal ‘once and for all,’ official says

The United States sees the fall of Bashar al-Assad as an extraordinary chance to rid Syria “once and for all” of chemical weapons that killed or injured thousands of people in its civil war, a senior US official says.

Washington will strongly back efforts by the global chemical weapons watchdog to eliminate Syria’s chemical arsenal, Nicole Shampaine, US ambassador to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, tells Reuters in an interview ahead of a closed-door OPCW session on Syria in The Hague.

At the meeting, the OPCW’s chief was expected to seek approval from key member states for funding and technical assistance to implement a time-consuming chemical nonproliferation process in Syria.

Syria joined the OPCW in 2013 under a US-Russian deal and agreed to eliminate its chemical arsenal. But after more than a decade of inspections, Syria still possesses banned munitions and investigators found such weapons were used repeatedly by Assad’s forces during the 13-year civil war.

“We want to finish the job and it’s really an opportunity for Syria’s new leadership to work with the international community, work with the OPCW to get the job done once and for all,” Shampaine says.

She expects “there will be a lot of support in trying to seize this opportunity…and get Syria to comply with its obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention” (CWC).

The OPCW is a treaty-based organization in the Netherlands tasked with implementing the 1997 chemical nonproliferation treaty. It oversaw the destruction of 1,300 metric tons of Syrian chemical weapons and precursors, a large portion on a US ship equipped with specialized hydrolysis systems.

Assad-ruled Syria and its military ally Russia always denied using chemical weapons in the devastating civil war.

Three investigations – a joint UN-OPCW mechanism, the OPCW’s Investigation and Identification team, and a UN war crimes investigation – concluded that Syrian government forces did use the nerve agent sarin and chlorine barrel bombs in the drawn-out conflict with opposition forces.