Syria’s chemical weapons removal scuppered by delays

The task of moving around 500 tonnes of highly toxic chemicals stockpiled by Bashar al-Assad's regime from government military bases to the Mediterranean port of Latakia has been delayed, Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and UN officials said.

Three days after the chemical weapons due to arrive in the Syrian port in Latakia for loading on to Danish and Norwegian ships, the delay in the multinational disarmament plan could threaten a UN-backed timetable.

According to sources involved in the disarmament effort, the roughly 500 tonnes of highly toxic chemicals which Bashar al-Assad's regime had stockpiled for the manufacture of Sarin and VX nerve agents are still in 12 bases around the country.

Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and UN officials overseeing the operation point out that the original timetable - which envisaged the first 500-tonne batch of the most dangerous chemical agents arriving in Latakia by the new year - have cited the delay to a combination of fighting, bad weather, delays in securing foreign contributions and bureaucratic snags.

"The most important deadline is by the end of March, by which time the first priproty consignment should be destroyed," OPCW said.

Assad's chemical stockpile will be neutralised at sea by a specially equipped US vessel, the Cape Ray, in a hydrolysis process involving the addition of hot water and chemical reagents that should take a maximum of 60 days.

That would give the Syrian government until roughly the end of January to deliver the material to the coast.

However, the Assad government has said that it would take at least 18 days to carry out the overland transport to Latakia.

In the wake of the delay, the Danish and Norwegian ships - the Ark Futura and the Taiko - have returned to the Cypriot port of Limassol since it became clear how far the schedule laid down by the OPCW had slipped.

Some of the materials have been packed into US-provided drums, but none of them have been loaded, a diplomat said. It is not clear whether the armoured Russian trucks flown into Syria to transport the chemical weapons have reached all 12 locations.

Meanwhile, US trucks carrying equipment like such as GPS tracking devices to help the movement of the chemicals have been held up at the Jordanian border, apparently by bureaucratic delays.