Asia

Home page

Asia

Syria on track to miss deadline to destroy chemical weapons

14 February 2014 23:08 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Syria has relinquished only 11 percent of its chemical weapons in three shipments and is on track to miss a politically-loaded midyear deadline to completely destroy the toxic stockpile, sources told Reuters on Friday, APA reports quoting Reuters.

Syria should already have handed over the 1,300 tonnes of toxic chemicals declared to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the body overseeing the process with the United Nations under a Russian-American deal.

A third shipment this week contained 54 metric tonnes of hexamine, a raw material for explosives, bringing the total shipped so far to a bit more than 140 tonnes, three sources at the OPCW said.

That includes only about 5 percent of the most toxic priority chemicals, the sources said.

"Let's be honest, the important materials have not yet been brought, except a little consignment at the beginning. That means we are well behind schedule," one source said.

"They must speed up if we are to make the deadline. We should have been ready (to start destruction) 10 days ago and we haven't even started."

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Sigrid Kaag, the head of the joint U.N./OPCW mission, have both recently expressed confidence the June 30 deadline can be met.

The next deadline is the end of March, when the most toxic chemicals, including sarin and mustard gas and their precursors, are supposed to have been destroyed outside the country.

"Rather than having handed over 11 percent, I see them as being 89 percent behind schedule," said another source involved in the process. "It is imperative that they get a move-on if they are to meet the target date."