UNITED NATIONS -- The U.N. disarmament chief Thursday reported the discovery of an undeclared chemical-warfare agent at a Syrian site to a Security Council meeting where the U.S. and its Western allies clashed with Russia over international findings that Syria has used chemical weapons.
Izumi Nakamitsu didn't name the agent detected in samples by the international chemical weapons watchdog, but said its presence "inside storage containers of large volume at a previously declared chemical weapons facility may imply undeclared production activities."
Syria joined the Chemical Weapons Convention in September 2013, pressed by its close ally Russia after a deadly chemical weapons attack that the West blamed on Damascus. By August 2014, President Bashar Assad's government declared that the destruction of its chemical weapons was completed. But Syria's initial declaration of its chemical stockpiles and chemical weapons production sites to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has remained in dispute.
Nakamitsu told the council that Syria also reiterated recently that a former chemical production facility was never used to produce chemical weapons. The chemical weapons group had said information and materials gathered there since 2014 indicated "that production and/or weaponization of chemical warfare nerve agents did, in fact, take place at this facility."
Nakamitsu, the U.N. high representative for disarmament affairs, said the chemical weapons group rejected Syria's latest denial and still maintains that the Assad government must declare all chemical warfare agents produced at the site.
She said the unadulterated chemical warfare agent found at the declared site is being added to the list of outstanding issues, whose number and nature "is concerning." She again called on Syria to fully cooperate with the chemical weapons group's technical experts to resolve them.
In April 2020, investigators blamed three chemical attacks in 2017 on the Syrian government. The chemical weapons group's Executive Council responded by demanding that Syria provide details.
When it didn't, France submitted a draft measure on behalf of 46 countries in November to suspend Syria's "rights and privileges" in the global watchdog. In an unprecedented vote April 21, the group suspended Syria's rights until all outstanding issues are resolved.
U.S. Deputy Ambassador Richard Mills welcomed the decision, saying it "sends a clear and collective message that the use of chemical weapons has consequences."
He said the April 12 report that found "reasonable grounds to believe" that a Syrian air force military helicopter dropped a chlorine cylinder on a Syrian town in 2018, sickening 12 people, should not be "a surprise" to those familiar with the Assad regime's abuses.
"The United States assesses that the regime's innumerable atrocities -- some of which rise to the level of war crimes, crimes against humanity -- include at least 50 chemical attacks since the conflict began" in Syria in 2011, Mills said. "We continue to assess that the Assad regime retains sufficient chemicals to use sari, to produce and deploy chlorine munitions and to develop new chemical weapons."
Russia's deputy ambassador, Dmitry Polyansky, reiterated Moscow's attack on the chemical weapons group and its investigators, accusing them of factual and technical errors and acting under pressure from Western nations whose intention is "to provoke Damascus to take drastic steps and thus achieve their own political objectives."