Assad retains hundreds of tons of chemical weapons, says defected general

2017/4/15 19:36:39

Technical facts collected by the United States and other observers and the testimony of defectors to the Syrian regime provide more than adequate proof that Bashar al-Assad is lying when he denies attacking his own citizens with prohibited chemical agents. Moreover, the Kremlin with excellent intelligence sources in the al-Assad regime is knowingly supporting the regime’s statements that they know to be lies.

 

Photo: Defected Syrian general Zaher al-Sakat (YouTube screenshot)

 

 


BY TIMES OF ISRAEL STAFF AND AFP April 15, 2017

 

President Bashar Assad still possesses hundreds of tons of chemical agents which he hid from the international community, a former Syrian general who specialized in chemical warfare told the Telegraph Friday.

 

Brig. Gen. Zaher al-Sakat, who defected from Assad’s forces in 2013 and currently resides in an undisclosed European country, told the newspaper the Syrian leader had deceived United Nations inspectors sent into the country to destroy his chemical stockpiles.

 

Assad had agreed to turn in his entire chemical weapons inventory in 2013 when the US threatened military action after hundreds were killed in a deadly chemical attack on opposition-held suburbs of Damascus.

 

But Sakat, who was head of chemical warfare in the Syrian army’s Fifth Division, has long claimed that Assad secretly held on to much of his stash. And after an April 4 suspected chemical attack killed at least 87 people, the defector has said the regime still has hundreds of tons of chemicals at hand.

 

“They admitted only to 1,300 tons, but we knew in reality they had nearly double that,” Sakat told the Telegraph. “They had at least 2,000 tons. At least.”

Sakat said that according to his contacts inside Syria, Assad has not manufactured new weapons since 2014, but “they don’t need any more, they have all they need already.”

Sakat has said in the past that he himself was ordered to carry out chemical strikes on three different occasions before he defected. In those instances, he switched out the deadly agents in the bombs for harmless chemicals.

 

“I couldn’t believe at the beginning that Assad would use these weapons on his people,” he said. “I could not stand and watch the genocide. I couldn’t hurt my own people.”

 

Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, the former commander of the UK’s Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) Regimen, said Sakat’s claims of Assad’s retained stockpiles were “plausible.”

 

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http://www.timesofisrael.com/defected ... tons-of-chemical-weapons/

 

 

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