UN atomic watchdog says found tonnes of nuclear material at Syria site

Speaking at a joint press conference with Grossi, Syria’s Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani said: “On July 17, we sent an official letter to the agency, in which we declared of our own free will the presence of nuclear materials at an undeclared site within the legacy left by the former regime.”

Shaibani said technical assessments indicated that the materials do not pose a risk, adding that they “will remain in Syrian national custody and subject to the agency’s safeguards system”.

Grossi, meanwhile, said, “This material will be accounted for, will be put within the international safeguards system.”

Syrian and IAEA experts will work together to safely store the materials, he said.

“We are starting to turn a page, and turning a page does not mean forgetting the past”.

Likely from reactor

Grossi also visited a site in Deir Ezzor in the east. It has been shut for 18 years.

In 2018, Israel admitted to carrying out a top-secret air raid against the site 11 years earlier. In 2008, less than a year after the strike, US officials accused Syria of having sought to build a secret nuclear reactor and acknowledged that Israel had destroyed it in the raid.

The UN atomic watchdog declared in 2011 that the Syrian site was “very likely” to have been a nuclear reactor, adding that information provided to it suggested that it was being built with North Korean assistance.

Pierre Razoux, academic director of French think tank the FMES Institute, told AFP the nuclear materials identified on Tuesday are “most likely … linked to the Syrian nuclear program, which was halted in 2007 after the Israeli raid on the Al-Kibar site” in Deir Ezzor.

He said, even so, that Syria may also have nuclear materials that Iraq secured rid of at the start of the 2000s.

Grossi said the find vindicated the IAEA’s longstanding suspicion that Syria had been secretly building a reactor and that the agency was “at the… site of Deir Ezzor, where a very comprehensive work of excavation and exploration is taking place now”.

Grossi’s visit came after news outlet Axios last week quoted US and Israeli officials as saying Washington and the IAEA reached an agreement to have the watchdog remove nuclear material stored at a clandestine site in Syria after having “reached understandings with Syria and Israel”.

Axios said Israel was closely monitoring a location called “Site 99”, where Israeli office-holders say the Assad government stored nuclear material that was part of the Deir Ezzor project, additionally known as Al-Kibar, and that Israel had threatened to bomb it.