The Times of Israel reports: In a confidential report, the UN-backed Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has found that Syria continues to manufacture chemical weapons, according to the journal Foreign Policy.
The 75-page report, seen by Foreign Policy, states that inspectors discovered traces of deadly toxins Sarin and VX in an underground laboratory known as Hafir 1.
In April 2016, the OPCW inspectors told The Hague that the samples they had collected at Hafir 1 “contain indicators of Sarin and VX nerve agents, which suggests that chemical weapons may have been produced and weaponized in this facility.”
Hafir 1 was never previously inspected by the OPCW. International powers involved in the Assad regime’s disarming itself of chemical weapons earlier in the country’s five-year civil war, including the US and Russia, had accepted Damascus’s claims that these facilities had never produced chemical weapons. But now it appears that the regime lied, not only producing the weapons at Hafir I, but even loading them into warheads.
According to the report, Damascus wanted to keep these warheads as an “insurance policy” against the rebels.
Read more here.
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