International experts were on Friday gearing up to disable the chemical weapons programme in war-hit Syria after reporting “encouraging” progress in a day of meetings with regime officials.
The Syrian regime and its armed opponents have both been accused of carrying out numerous atrocities in the 30-month conflict, which began as a popular uprising and has since snowballed into a full-blown war that has killed 115,000.
In a television interview broadcast on Friday, President Bashar al-Assad again denied having perpetrated an August 21 chemical weapons attack on the outskirts of Damascus that killed hundreds of people and prompted Washington to threaten military action.
Syria’s chemical arsenal – to be destroyed under a United Nations resolution – were in the hands of “special forces” who were the only ones capable of using them, Assad told opposition Turkish channel Halk TV.
“Preparing these weapons is a complex technical operation ... and a special procedure is necessary to use them which requires a central order from the army chief of staff. As a result it is impossible that they were used,” he said.
A team of experts from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the United Nations has been tasked with implementing the UN resolution to destroy the banned arsenal by mid-next year.