Progress in the disarmament of Syria’s chemical weapons program seems to be coming quick and often, with the latest reports from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) confirming 11 sites have now been visited, and “critical equipment” destroyed at six of them.
The first destruction only began 10 days ago, when the OPCW oversaw the destruction of mixing equipment and warheads at a site involved in the program, which Syria has committed to dismantle.
The overall disarmament program is expected to take at least until summer of 2014, with the OPCW saying that finishing the process on time is going to necessitate a ceasefire, because the civil war is making some of the sites hard to reach.
Though Syria’s chemical arsenal is quite large, much of it is in the form of unweaponized chemicals, and officials have said that the process of neutralizing such chemicals will be fairly straightforward.