Syria's remaining chemical stockpile shipped out

The final batch of Syria’s declared chemical weapons was shipped out on Monday, the Director-General of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), Ahmet Uzumcu, announced during a press conference at The Hague in the Netherlands.

“Never before has an entire arsenal of a category of weapons of mass destruction been removed from a country experiencing a state of internal armed conflict,” said Uzumcu. “And this has been accomplished within very demanding and tight timeframes.”

Uzumcu said that the final 8 per cent of the known 1,300-tonne stockpile was loaded onto ships in the Syrian port of Latakia.

Syria also announced that it had shipped out the last part of its chemical weapons before the scheduled end of the programme.

“We cannot say for sure [Syria] has no more chemical weapons,” Uzumcu said. “All we can do is work on the basis of verifying a country’s declarations of what they have. I would not make any speculation to possible remaining assets, substances, chemical weapons.”

“The mission to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons programme has been a major undertaking marked by an extraordinary international cooperation,” said Uzumcu.

The work to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons was an effort by 30 different countries, each helping to provide needed equipment and transportation.

US Secretary of State John Kerry paid tribute to the work done by the OPCW to empty Syria of dangerous weapons after the death of over 1,000 in an attack in August 2013.

“It is very important, however, even as we mark this moment of removing 100 per cent of the declared weapons,” said Kerry, “that we understand that our work is not finished to ensure the complete elimination of Syria’s chemical weapons programme.”

He added: “There are still some serious issues that remain to be addressed, and we are not going to stop until those have been addressed.”