UN nuclear watchdog chief visits Syria for first time since 2011 to restart talks

UN nuclear watchdog chief Rafael Grossi said he visited Damascus on Tuesday to restart talks focused on fostering confidence in the peaceful use of atomic energy by Syria.

Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, met with President Bashar Assad, who had extended the invitation, and Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad.

“We’re ready to start working on reigniting high-level dialogue between the IAEA and Syria, focusing on building confidence in the peaceful use of nuclear energy in Syria,” Grossi wrote in a post on X.

Syria’s state news agency also reported Grossi’s visit.

IAEA inspectors last visited Syria in 2011, the year its civil war began after the government’s violent crackdown on street protests against Assad’s rule.

They were seeking to revive a stalled IAEA investigation into activity at a site in Syria’s eastern desert that US intelligence had deemed to be a nascent, North Korean-designed reactor intended to produce plutonium for atomic weaponry, before Israel bombed it to rubble in 2007.

The Vienna-based IAEA also sought information about other sites that may have been linked to the Deir al-Zour facility.

The Syrian nuclear reactor site before it was destroyed by the IDF in 2007, as seen by satellite (Photo: Google Earth)

Syrian authorities have said it was a non-nuclear military site, but the IAEA concluded in 2011 that it was “very likely” to have been a reactor that should have been declared to nuclear non-proliferation inspectors.

Israel only formally confirmed that it had been behind the 2007 bombing of the Deir al-Zour facility in 2018.

In the immediate aftermath of the strike, known to much of the world as Operation Orchard, the view that prevailed in Israel at the time was that keeping news of what had been done as quiet as possible would help Syrian dictator Bashar Assad save face and prevent him from feeling he had to retaliate, which could have led to all-out war.