For years before its sudden collapse this week, the brutal regime of deposed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad attacked rebels along with civilians caught up in the country’s civil war with chemical weapons such as chlorine bombs, sulfur mustard, and the nerve agent sarin. Now, concerns are rising about any remaining stockpiles of these weapons—as well as the scientists involved in the illicit program.
“It is up to the international community to seize this opportunity … to eradicate this criminal program once and for all,” Fernando Arias, director general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), said on 12 December at an emergency meeting of the implementing body for the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). “We have heard positive signals from within Syria on the need to rid the country of any chemical weapons” left there, he said. However, “To date, we have not received any official request from any Syrian authorities.”
Not waiting for an invitation, Israel swiftly bombed Syrian military assets, including the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center (SSRC), a sprawling military enterprise thought to employ as many as 20,000 people at institutes across the country. Israel “bombed all of SSRC’s institutes,” including chemical weapons R&D and production facilities, says Boaz Shapira, an analyst with Israel’s Alma Research and Education Center.
The airstrikes may have destroyed weapons stocks and infrastructure, but they “could create a risk of contamination,” noted Arias, who also worries they could have pulverized evidence needed for prosecuting past use of chemical weapons as war crimes. Moreover, degraded security at the bombed sites could lead to “dangerous chemicals or equipment being lost, without any control,” Arias said.
Syria long denied possessing a chemical arsenal until an infamous 21 August 2013 attack in which government forces rained sarin-filled rockets on Ghouta, then a rebel-held district of Damascus, killing hundreds. Two months later, Russia and the United States strong-armed Syria into ratifying the CWC. Joining the treaty required Syrian authorities to declare their chemical weapons stockpiles and infrastructure. “Everyone hoped they would be honest,” says Paul Walker, a chemical weapons expert at Green Cross International.
Initial signs were promising: Based on Syria’s declaration, OPCW oversaw the elimination of more than 1300 tons of chemical warfare agents and precursors and the destruction of 27 production facilities. “The scale of the tragedy could have been unimaginable” had Syria not joined the CWC and retained all its stockpiles for use later in its civil war, says Stefano Costanzi, a chemist and nonproliferation analyst at American University.
But Syria had not come clean. After joining the CWC, it conducted scores more chemical attacks. In an especially egregious incident in April 2017, government forces fired sarin-laden rockets at Khan Shaykhun in northwestern Syria, killing 89 people.
In response, the U.S. dispatched cruise missiles at a Syrian airbase and the U.S. Department of the Treasury imposed sanctions such as blocking assets of 271 SSRC staff, including many scientists, tied to the chemical weapons program. Then in April 2018, a pair of chlorine cylinders dropped from a helicopter in Douma, a city northeast of Damascus, killed 43 people.
Now, outsiders worry members of Syria’s chemical weapons brain trust could end up in hostile nations such as Iran, or working either voluntarily or against their will for the Islamic State or other terrorist groups in Syria. “Brain drain is a huge risk,” says Gregory Koblentz, a chemical weapons expert at George Mason University. “These scientists don’t have jobs, and some will be considered war criminals.” They are likely hiding from Syria’s new central authority, led by the militant group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham.
Any remaining weapons are also a concern. “One of the Assad regime’s biggest secrets,” Koblentz says, is the extent of the stockpiles Syria hid from OPCW inspectors, who conducted regular inspections of SSRC chemical weapons facilities in Barzeh and Jamraya near Damascus. Syrian authorities “used every excuse under the Sun to get around fulfilling their treaty obligations,” Walker says.
On 24 November, just days before the Assad regime fell, OPCW noted its inspectors were probing whether Syria maintained “potentially large quantities of chemical warfare agents”—including sarin, sarin precursors, and chlorine intended for military use—and whether it was pursuing “full-scale development and production of chemical weapons” at two sites authorities had claimed had never been put in operation.
One lucky break came as rebels closed in on Damascus last week: Government troops putting up a feeble defense did not resort to chemical weapons. “It’s very surprising these weren’t used in the regime’s most dire hour,” Koblentz says. “We can assume it was hard for Assad to order such action,” Shapira adds. “Most of the soldiers either fled or joined the rebels.”
Arias says OPCW’s current priority “will be to engage with the new Syrian authorities as soon as possible, and work with them to finally determine the full extent of the Syrian chemical weapons program to ensure that the risk of proliferation or use of chemical weapons is contained.” It could take weeks before the situation on the ground is safe enough for OPCW teams to make their own visit, Koblentz says.
If OPCW succeeds in rooting out the remnants of Syria’s chemical weapons program, that could put pressure on two other Middle Eastern nations—Egypt and Israel—to shutter what nonproliferation experts assert are undeclared chemical weapons programs. And pressure will mount on Syria’s new leadership to extradite individuals involved in Assad’s program.
Syrian human rights groups and victims of chemical attacks have called on nations to establish a chemical weapons tribunal to try the war crimes cases. Syria’s new government “will want to have a justice process for the atrocities under Assad,” Koblentz says. “Chemical weapons will be high on that list.”
