BERLIN
Germany has destroyed 370 tons of Syria’s chemical weapons, the country’s Foreign Ministry announced late on Monday.
“A remarkable international collaboration has enabled us first to secure the chemical weapons arsenal of the Syrian regime which was revealed in 2013, then to safely transport them abroad and now also to destroy them,” German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said.
Toxic material, which had already been neutralized onboard the specially equipped U.S. vessel “MV Cape Ray” in the Mediterranean in July and August 2014, had been brought to Munster in northwestern Germany last September for a final incinerating process.
The German Foreign Ministry said that the final destruction of the chemicals concluded on April 30 at GEKA, a state-owned company responsible for disposing of chemical warfare agents.
Experts from the Intergovernmental Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons monitored the process.
While 98 percent of Syria’s declared chemical weapons stockpile has been destroyed, the failure by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad to fully declare and destroy its entire program remains a concern for the international community.
Last month, Germany and its G7 partners slammed the continued use of chemical weapons in Syria against civilians.
“We condemn in the strongest terms the continued use of chlorine gas as a chemical weapon by the Assad regime,” G7 foreign ministers said in a joint statement on April 15, following their meeting in northern German city of Lubeck.
“The use of toxic chemicals as chemical weapons in Syria inter alia violates the Chemical Weapons Convention as well as UNSC Resolutions 2118 and 2209. We remain united in our determination to hold accountable those responsible for such inhumane acts,” the ministers said.
In 2013, the use of chemical weapons in Syria shocked the world and brought the U.S. to the brink of involvement in the country's civil war.
The UN Security Council decided to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons after forces loyal to President Assad allegedly killed more than 1,000 people in a sarin gas attack on a Damascus suburb in August that year.
In July 2014, Syria’s declared chemical weapons were loaded onto the “MV Cape Ray” which turned them into waste through hydrolysis – a process in which water is used to break the chemical bonds in a substance.
Other facilities in Finland, the United Kingdom and the United States also took part in disposing of toxic chemicals from Syria.
