Americas

Americas

U.S. accuses Syria of stalling on chemical arms handover

01 February 2014 00:04 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. The United States on Thursday accused Syria of dragging its feet on giving up its chemical arms, putting at risk a deal to remove such weapons of mass destruction from the country as it splits apart in a chaotic civil war, APA reports quoting Reuters.

President Barack Obama this week touted the chemical weapons agreement as one of the few U.S. diplomatic achievements on Syria, but the State Department said just 4 percent of Syria's deadliest chemical agents has been shipped out of the country for destruction at sea.

The United States has few good choices to force President Bashar al-Assad to comply.

A State Department spokeswoman warned that a military option was still possible but urged diplomacy and called on Russia to pressure its ally Damascus to comply with an agreement struck last year to surrender its chemical arsenal.

"The effort to remove chemical agents and key precursor chemicals from Syria has seriously languished and stalled," Robert Mikulak, the U.S. representative to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), told the world's chemicals weapons watchdog in The Hague.

In a blistering statement, Mikulak accused Syria of "open-ended delaying" of the disarmament process.

Assad's decision in September to give up chemical arms helped him avoid threatened U.S. air strikes in retaliation for a poison gas attack near Damascus in August that killed hundreds of people, many of them women and children.

But the international operation to dispose of Syria's chemical stockpile is now six to eight weeks behind schedule and it will miss next week's deadline for sending all toxic agents abroad for destruction, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Delays pose a difficult challenge for Obama, who has faced criticism at home and abroad for failing to do more to quell Syria's nearly 3-year-old civil war.

Obama cited the chemical weapons deal in his annual state of the Union address on Tuesday, saying "American diplomacy, backed by the threat of force, is why Syria's chemical weapons are being eliminated."