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World


THE CHALLENGES OF WEAPONS INSPECTIONS IN SYRIA

Published April 17, 2018 at 4:16 AM CDT
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Listen • 4:25

NOEL KING, HOST:

Syrian state television is reporting that weapons inspectors from the
Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, or OPCW, have been allowed
into Douma. Douma, of course, is the site of a suspected chemical weapons attack
earlier this month. Before today, Russian and Syrian officials had stopped the
team from reaching Douma because the investigators didn't have the right U.N.
permissions. Now, that kind of delay is one of the major challenges of this type
of work. Jerry Smith knows this well. He's a former OPCW inspector who worked in
Syria in 2013. He joined us earlier from Salisbury in the U.K.

All right. So we are seeing this in real time. The investigators can't just go
wherever they want, whenever they want. This all has to be negotiated with the
Syrian government, huh?

JERRY SMITH: Sure. Yeah. The key thing is with these kind of international
investigations is it all requires a mandate, and that mandate has to be agreed
by everybody. So, you know, these guys are not world police that can just go in
anywhere. They have to be given the approvals and to make all their preparations
and stuff entirely with the approval of the host state.

KING: But I would imagine an investigation like this is somewhat time sensitive.
I mean, as the days go by, is it going to get harder to tell what happened?

SMITH: Yeah. I mean, again, with any investigation that's the case, and
particularly with something like this. So, you know, if you think about how we
have a police investigation in our country then, you know, the scene is cordoned
off rapidly, we have access control there, we have the police starting to deal
with the crime scene almost immediately. With something like this, we've had
over a week now where people, lots of different people, we don't know who, may
have traipsed in and out of that. And the other thing is that there is the
potential for the material, if it is a gas attack or, you know, a chemical
weapons attack then that material is degrading in the atmosphere. So every day
the chances of getting good hits, good sampling becomes less and less.

KING: We should say that the mandate of the OPCW is not to determine who carried
out this attack but simply to determine what weapons were used. Could their
findings, though, shed any light on who might be behind this?

SMITH: Yeah. Absolutely. You know, as you said, the mandate is tight. It's about
the what. It's not the who. This, again, is important because there has to be
agreed in the international community. And, you know, we've got a whole bunch of
stakeholders, some of whom don't agree with each other. You know, the Syrian
government on one side, and Russia and Iran, and then the U.S., U.K. and others
on the other. So yeah, really complex. And what they need to do then is just
arrange and agree and go for the investigation as soon as they can.

KING: Yeah. A complex situation that you have actually found yourself in the
center of, right? You went to Syria in 2013 to lead an effort to get Bashar
Assad to give up his chemical weapons. He did hand over more than a thousand
tons of chemical weapons by some estimates. Is it clear to you now that he
withheld some or made new ones?

SMITH: Well, you know, going back to that time there, you know, I guess
President Obama had a tough call to make. He had the options to either accept
the Syrian declaration - and I guess he would have had some pretty major
intelligence on what the U.S. and the West thought Syria had - or to go for the
bombing option. You know, Syria was not, or, the Syrian government was not in
the position of power it is now. So I guess you look to that and a risk
assessment, say, well, if we bomb we might not get very much out, and we may
even have to send in troops to secure. So let's get out what Syria declares.
Have they kept some back? Well, there's a distinct possibility, and I think
sadly we've seen a few events over the past few years where sarin has been used
- and that's been demonstrated quite clearly by the U.N. guise - and therefore
it would appear that some's been kept back. I guess the alternative is that
they've made more, but I suspect the former is the more likely.

KING: Jerry, how realistic do you think it is that the West could prevent Assad
from using chemical weapons again without actually removing him from power?

SMITH: I think that's a tough one. Essentially, you know, the genie's out of the
bottle. Chemical weapons are a bully's weapon. They're not for modern-day
warfare from any of the advanced countries, but they could still be used by
bullies. It's a tough one to prevent them from doing it.

KING: Jerry Smith is former weapons inspector who founded the security firm
RameHead Consulting International. He joined us via Skype. Jerry, thanks so
much.

SMITH: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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