“[My time at ACA] prepared me very well for the position that I took following that with the State Department, where I then implemented and helped to implement many of the policies that we tried to promote.”
OPCW Chief Visits Syria for Talks on Chemical Weapons
March 2025
The head of the international chemical-weapons watchdog agency visited Damascus in February, marking a major step toward resetting relations with Syria after the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad in December 2024.
Fernando Arias, director-general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), and his team met with the interim president and foreign minister of Syria’s caretaker government in what the OPCW described as “long, productive and very open” discussions on Syria’s chemical weapons program.
Since 2022, the United Nations has bemoaned the lack of progress by the Syrian government in meeting its obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). Last year’s overthrow of Assad and his government by Syrian rebels is seen as a new opening. (See ACT, January/February 2025.) Arias presented Syrian officials with an action plan drafted by the OPCW Technical Secretariat to help Syria address the remaining issues with its chemical weapons declaration.
After years of denying the program's existence, Syria submitted a declaration of its chemical weapons and facilities to the OPCW in September 2013. In January 2016, the OPCW announced that Syria’s entire declared stockpile of 1,308 metric tons of chemical agent and precursor chemicals had been destroyed. The OPCW determined, however, that the Syrian government continued to use chemical weapons even after the bulk of the declared stockpile had been eliminated.
“Today’s visit to #Syria marks a reset,” Arias said in a Feb. 8 post on X. “After 11 years of obstruction by the previous authorities, the Syrian caretaker authorities have a chance to turn the page and meet Syria’s obligations under the Convention.”—MINA ROZEI