Syria/chemical weapons: "Further cooperation needed to resolve remaining outstanding issues"

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Published Jun 22, 2024

Security Council briefing by Izumi Nakamitsu, Under-Secretary-General and High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, on the situation in the Middle East (Syrian chemical weapons).

High Representative for Disarmament Affairs Izumi Nakamitsu today (11 Jun) told the Security Council that “sufficient information” had been gathered to consider three outstanding issues in Syria’s chemical weapons programme as “resolved.” However, Nakamitsu said, “further cooperation is needed to resolve the remaining outstanding issues.”

Out of the twenty-four outstanding issues in Syria’s original declaration in 2014, seventeen still remain unresolved as of the date of the latest monthly report.

Nakamitsu said, “I am encouraged to see the positive impacts of this renewed cooperation, which began with the resumption of consultations between the Declaration Assessment Team (DAT) and the Syrian National Authority in October 2023 after a gap of more than two and a half years.”

The substance of the outstanding issues, she told the Council, “concerns and involves, inter alia, undeclared research, production and / or weaponization of unknown quantities of chemical weapons and significant quantities of chemical warfare agents and / or precursors and chemical munitions whose fate has not yet been fully verified by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) Technical Secretariat.”

The High Representative said, “serious concerns remain regarding the presence of unexpected chemicals” in the samples collected by the DAT between 2020 and 2023 at several declared sites.”

She urged all parties “to not only maintain, but to enhance cooperation going forward, so that all outstanding issues regarding the initial and subsequent declarations submitted by the Syrian Arab Republic can be resolved.”

United States Ambassador Robert Wood told the Council that the US “has long been concerned the Syrian regime retains residual chemical weapons capability,” and noted that the OPCW “continues to uncover new alarming evidence.”

Wood said, “such results clearly demonstrated the Assad regime has neither declared nor accounted for the full history and scope of its chemical weapons program.”

For his part, Syrian Ambassador Koussay Aldahhak said, “Syria reiterates its request to the technical Secretariat of the OPCW and Western countries who continue to politicize this file and to use it for their hostile ends, to not prejudice the consultations underway between the national committee and the declaration assessment team.”

Aldahhak said, “we would ask them to refrain from launching false accusations and undermining cooperation that is underway between Syria and OPCW.”