There is no cause for celebration at the UN's announcement on Monday that the last of Syria's chemical weapons have been shipped out of the country for destruction. This is because the statement is simply untrue. Around eight percent of the stockpile that the Assad regime has declared is stuck at a site whose location has not been revealed, because Damascus claims it is too dangerous to try and ship the materials to Aleppo. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the body that the UN has asked to oversee the collection of Assad's poison gas arsenal, appears content with this explanation. It should not be. Even if it is indeed impossible to move the armaments, it has to be asked why. Given the duplicitous and slippery nature of the regime, it is perfectly possible that it has organized what appears to be insecurity in the locality to ensure that it can keep hold of this part of its deadly stockpile. And then there is the important word “declared”. The poison gases that have been removed are only those that Assad and his people have admitted to possessing. There is no telling what other stores of chemical agents they still have stashed away. Even as the OPCW team were at work organizing the shipping out of the known chemical weapons, there were credible reports of murderous gas clouds resulting from regime shelling. So where have these chemicals come from? The weapons inspectors were supposed to know the location and quantity of every part of the arsenal. If that is true, then they would have realized that part of one or more of the stockpiles was missing. But OPCW has said nothing about any such shortfall. Either they are concealing important information for reasons that can only be guessed at, or Assad still has undeclared poisons. It has to be almost certain that the latter is the case. This is a regime that knows no honor and acknowledges no limit to the horrors that it is prepared to inflict on its own people. The question now is what is the international community going to do about this deception? Has Washington quietly backed the demolition of the chemical arsenal to which the regime has admitted, in the hope that it will be easier to see to the destruction of the concealed stockpiles by some other means? Or has the indecisive President Barack Obama given up on any attempt to force Assad from office and to pursue the dictator and his henchmen for war crimes? It was the massacre of some 1,400 people in a Damascus suburb that was the “red line” that Assad crossed in August last year. Obama's failure to carry out his threat of military retribution against the regime was a tragic scandal. It was also a clear lesson to the dictatorship that there would be no problems from the US if it continued with its chemical barbarity. Thus it seems almost certain that there are far more chemical weapons that have not been declared which pose a deadly threat not just to Syrians but to the rest of the world if this awful arsenal falls into terrorist hands. Assad has made a fool of Obama. Now he has also made a fool of the UN and the OPCW. When is this fearful farce going to end?
