The New York Times, 17 June 2015 – The monitoring group overseeing the destruction of Syria’s chemical arms stockpile said Wednesday that almost all effluent from the neutralized weapons had been eliminated, portraying the progress as a great success in the nearly two years since Syria agreed to relinquish its arsenal.
But the news from the group, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, was partly overshadowed by outrage over what critics of the Syrian government call its increasingly brazen use of chlorine in makeshift poison gas bombs dumped on civilians and suspected rebels in the civil war.
Witnesses at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing in Washington, including a Syrian doctor and a civil defense coordinator from areas said to have been attacked, described the chlorine bombs as horrific weapons that had asphyxiated young children.
One witness, Dr. Annie Sparrow, a pediatrician and rights activist who has helped train doctors working in rebel-held areas of Syria, accused the Syrian government not only of using chlorine in bombs, but also of withholding chlorine for water purification and other critical sanitation needs in areas it does not control.
Dr. Sparrow, an outspoken critic of the Syrian government, said it had “transformed a principal element of public health into a tool of disease and terror.”

Such attacks would also violate the Chemical Weapons Convention, which the Syrian government, under heavy pressure from Russia, signed in 2013 to avert an attack threatened by the United States.
But there is substantial evidence of what Mr. Assad’s opponents describe as at least 29 chlorine bomb attacks launched from government helicopters in rebel-held parts of northern Syria this year. In March, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution condemning them, without ascribing responsibility.
Samantha Power, the American ambassador to the United Nations, has repeatedly warned that those responsible for chlorine bomb attacks will be held accountable. But it remains unclear when, or even whether, the Security Council will take more decisive action.
The question of an international response to the chlorine attacks has been further complicated by recent evidence suggesting that Assad secretly withheld some banned chemical compounds from destruction.
Domestic critics of President Obama, who once famously declared that chemical weapons use in Syria would violate his “red line” and would force American action, have called his response far too tentative — an accusation his aides strongly deny.
“Assad has seen the world’s complacency and decided that he can literally get away with murder,” said Representative Ed Royce, a California Republican and the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, which convened the hearing in Washington.
Chlorine is considered a dual-use chemical, with many important industrial and hygienic applications in addition to its capacity as a weapon, and it is not on the list of toxic substances, including nerve agent ingredients and mustard gas, that Assad was required to give up when Syria acceded to the Chemical Weapons Convention banning them.
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which oversees compliance with the treaty, said nothing about chlorine in its announcement on Wednesday, which was devoted to updates on the elimination of Syria’s banned chemical munitions.
It said effluents created aboard the Cape Ray — the American naval vessel that neutralized 600 tons of Syrian toxins, including sulfur mustard and DF, a precursor chemical to nerve agents — had been destroyed at facilities in Germany and Finland last week.

Of the entire 1,300-ton Syrian stockpile, the organization said, 16 tons of hydrogen fluoride remain to be destroyed at a facility in Port Arthur, Tex.