Fourteen countries are helping remove, destroy and dispose of Syria’s massive chemical weapons stockpile, yet none of these countries could agree on where to dispose of the final product. The solution; dump them in the Mediterranean…
The process of decommissioning Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal has begun, with the first batch of the country’s chemicals safely loaded aboard a Danish cargo ship in the northwest Syrian port of Lattakia.
Extracting the hazardous material — precursor chemicals used to produce sarin and mustard gas and a small amount of produced mustard gas, known as ‘priority one’ chemicals — is a complex international effort. The first stage is securely packing the chemicals at 12 sites across Syria, two of which are in the middle of battlefields, and transporting them to the port. This is the responsibility of the Syrian army, which will be guarded en route by armoured trucks provided by Russia.
They are then loaded on to two cargo ships provided by Denmark and Norway, which have also supplied naval vessels to escort the ships out of Syrian waters. Additional security at the port is being provided by Russian forces, while the US has supplied loading and decontamination equipment, China has supplied ambulances, and Finland has supplied an emergency response team in case of accidents.
The Danish cargo ship carrying the first batch of chemicals has now moved back out into international waters to wait for more chemicals to arrive at the port in Lattakia. Once the cargo ship has taken onboard its full consignment it will set sail for an unnamed port in Italy, protected by a flotilla of naval vessels from Denmark, Norway, Russia and China.
When the flotilla arrives at its destination in Italy it will transfer its cargo of priority one checmicals to a US Maritime Administration ship, the MV Cape Ray. Around 150 tonnes of priority two chemicals, toxic material not disimilar to industrial chemical agents, will be transported to the UK with the help of the Royal Navy and destroyed by a commercial company in the UK. The Foreign Office estimates the cost at less than £1 million.
The 648-foot, 22,000-tonne MV Cape Ray will then transport the priority one chemicals out into international waters in the Mediterranean, where US Military personnel will break them down in field stations on the ships’ internal trailer deck. It will be the first time the US military has disposed of chemical weapons at sea.
Read the full story from The Telegraph.
There have been some protest, but it has received little media attention:
Τhe graveyard of highly toxic weapons will be off Crete, west from the Chania prefecture. Reason enough for Cretans in particular and Greek sin general to protest the process claiming environmental reasons. An international petition against the dumping of the Syrian chemicals in the Mediterranean Seas has already been set up in the petition website avaaz.org:
“Dumping of 800 tonnes of chemical weapons treated with hydrolysis in the Mediterranean will cause serious pollution, environmental degradation and severe threats to public health. It does not respect local societies, international conventions and very valuable ecosystems and marine species present in the area.” (read and sign petition here)
Speaking to defense news website onalert.gr, a Greek official said he couldn’t believe that any scientist at the OPCW would like to poison a broader area among so many countries.
But Greek experts doubt that the hydrolysis method is secure enough.
Full story: Failaka
And here we compare the map above with this one:
