A warm Syrian minister applauded by diplomats of the Executive Council of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCO). The scene seemed so far well improbable. Eleven years after the membership of Damascus to the organization of disarmament, the Minister of Foreign Affairs Syrian, Assaad al-Chaibani, was committed, Wednesday, March, in “Demantle” what remains of the country’s chemical arsenal, in order to “To put an end to this inheritance and to ensure that Syria becomes a nation aligned with the international community”. A commitment from the new Syria to “The memory of those who lost their lives by asphyxiation in the hands of the Assad regime”had written the minister, on social networks, shortly before the meeting in The Hague, where the OPCA sits.
Under the ferrule of Bashar al-Assad, Syria had resigned itself to joining the organization in October 2013, while the Westerners threatened to intervene militarily against its regime, following attacks on sarin gas against eastern Ghouta (the suburbs of Damascus), on August 5 and 21, 2013, which had left nearly 1,500 dead. Having become a member of the OPCO, Damascus found himself in the obligation to provide the precise inventory of his arsenal for his destruction. In the months that followed, inspectors dispatched to Syria organized the destruction of 1,300 tonnes of chemical agents and 24 production and storage facilities. This operation, the largest in the history of chemical disarmament, earned the Nobel Peace Prize in 2013 in 2013.
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