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A civilian team at a base in Maryland disposed of Syrian toxins a decade ago after hundreds of people were killed in a nerve agent attack.
Dec. 25, 2024, 10:40 a.m. ET
Since armed rebels entered Damascus, Syria, and overthrew the reign of President Bashar al-Assad on Dec. 8, U.S. government officials have been waiting to see if any remnants of the former regime’s stockpiles of chemical weapons would be found.
None are known to have turned up so far. If they did, it is unclear what might happen to them or who would be responsible for disposing of them. But a U.S. military mission to destroy Syrian chemical weapons a decade ago could offer the White House some viable options.
About a year and a half after the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, Maj. Gen. Jay G. Santee found himself in a meeting at the Pentagon discussing a hypothetical problem.
At the time, he was the deputy director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a military office that looks for ways to prevent adversaries from attacking the United States with weapons of mass destruction.
Syria had not officially declared having any chemical weapons. But U.S. intelligence assessments indicated that the Assad government probably had a clandestine cache.
The likely candidates were sarin, a nerve agent easily absorbed through the skin that disrupts a victim’s central nervous system and leads to muscle spasms, paralysis and respiratory failure; mustard, which causes horrific blistering on skin or inside a victim’s lungs if its vapors are inhaled; and chlorine, which was used by insurgents in Iraq against U.S. forces in the mid-2000s. When released in confined spaces, chlorine can lead to suffocation.
