By Alexander Mercouris
We are soon approaching the first anniversary of the fall of Bashar Al-Assad’s Baathist government in Syria.
Assad himself and his family are in exile somewhere in Russia, probably in Moscow. As widely reported in the media the man whose Jihadi militia overthrew him and who is now Syria’s interim President - Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, aka ‘Abu Mohammad al-Julani - also recently visited Moscow where he had a very friendly meeting with Assad’s friend and erstwhile protector President Putin of Russia. The Kremlin has published the opening comments Putin and al-Sharaa made at the start of the meeting http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/78213.
Most of the commentary about al-Sharaa’s visit to Moscow has centred on the future of the Russian bases. Here I will briefly state my own view, which is that most commentary is getting this topic the wrong way round, assuming that it is the Russians who want to remain, whereas the reality is that it is al-Sharaa who is trying to persuade the Russians to stay.
There were always doubts in Russia about the wisdom of Russia’s involvement in Syria, which some saw as a high risk intervention in a region dominated by the US on behalf of a leader (Assad) who had previously distanced himself from Russia and had seemed to favour closer ties with the West, and obviously the sudden collapse of Assad’s government last year reinforced those doubts, with all sorts of comments circulating in the Russian media space last year that it was time for Russia to leave.
By contrast al-Sharaa, beset on all sides and caught in a duel between Israel and Turkey, has good reasons to want the Russians to stay. Their presence gives him leverage over the West and the Israelis, as well as his Turkish friends, and perhaps guarantees him a measure of Russian support in the future. There are reports for example that he has asked Putin for help to retrain and rearm his militia so that it can become a proper army, and that he also wants Russian help to rebuild Syria’s oil industry. Moreover Syria depends heavily on Russia for its food imports and al-Sharaa obviously wants those to continue.
The point I want to discuss here however is not about the Russian bases, interesting topic though that is, but about Syria’s supposed Assad era stockpiles of WMD.
This was once a massive subject. After Obama in 2012 made use of chemical weapons by Assad’s government in Syria’s civil war a red line, a massive crisis broke out in 2013 following an alleged Syrian government chemical weapons attack in the Damascus suburbs of Ghouta. The Obama administration came very close to launching a devastating attack on Syria, which was only averted by strong domestic opposition in the US and Britain and by Russian mediation.
After the Ghouta crisis Assad’s government used the good offices of the Russians and the OPCW to supposedly surrender its entire WMD stockpile. However a constant drumbeat of claims continued after that in reality Assad had cheated, and had retained large secret stockpiles of WMD, and that his military continued to use them and had carried out chemical weapon attack on Khan Shaukhun and Douma in 2017 and 2018.
The US, Britain and France for their part carried out large scale missile strikes against Syria supposedly in response to these alleged chemical weapons attacks.
The Assad government heatedly denied claims that Syria had engaged in chemical weapon attacks after surrendering its WMD arsenal in 2014, whilst a small but vocal body of commentators, mostly on independent media (including The Duran) were skeptical of these claims.
Following the attack on Douma it emerged that there were also doubts within the OPCW, with some of the inspectors sent to Douma publicly making their doubts known. As I remember the leadership of the OPCW acted decisively to quell these doubts, without however properly responding to the reasons for them. The OPCW inspectors who had raised the doubts, to the best of my recollection lost their jobs.
The fall of Assad’s government ought to have resolved this issue. Al-Sharaa has been keen to establish good relations with the West and claims of Syrian government chemical weapon attacks had played an important part in the information war that discredited with the public in the West the Assad government against which he had been fighting and which he ultimately overthrew.
In December 2024, just a few weeks after Assad’s fall, an article appeared in Reuters which spoke of steps being prepared for OPCW inspectors to return to Syria to find Assad’s secret WMD stockpiles. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/assads-fall-brings-the-moment-rid-syria-chemical-weapons-2024-12-09/
Almost a year has passed and there is no record of anything being found.
A recent article (25th October 2025) in Levant 24 is entitled ‘Syria Accelerates Destruction of Assad-Era Chemical Weapons. https://levant24.com/news/2025/10/syria-accelerates-destruction-of-assad-era-chemical-weapons/ . However the article, despite its title, does not actually refer to any stockpiles of Assad era chemical weapons having been found or of their being destroyed. Instead it speaks vaguely of “a sweeping campaign to destroy all remaining remnants of the chemical weapons programme developed under the ousted regime of Bashar al-Assad”. It also says that “Recent OPCW missions, conducted in cooperation with the Syrian authorities, have revisited declared sites and inspected previously unexamined facilities at Barzeh and Jamraya”. However there is no word of any stockpiles actually being found in these two places.
Interestingly, though the Levant 24 article says that “Assad’s forces launched at least 222 chemical attacks between 2012 and 2021, including the 2013 Ghouta massacre that killed 1,144 people, among them 1,119 civilians”, there is no reference in the article to the alleged Khan Shaukhun and Douma attacks of 2017 and 2018, which took place after the Assad government had supposedly surrendered its stockpiles of WMD.
There is no suggestion that al-Sharaa brought up this topic of Assad’s chemical attacks with Putin during their recent meeting and the Western media, which once gave enormous coverage to this topic, now has nothing to say about it. All interest in the topic seems to have gone.
Could it be that the reason that there is no interest in this topic, and non-existent coverage of it in the Western media, is that no-one has found anything, and that this embarrassing fact is one that Western governments and their media backers would rather not discuss?
After the fall of Saddam Hussein the failure to find WMD in Iraq massively damaged the reputation of those who had advocated the invasion of Iraq. This makes the lack of interest this time striking.
I suspect that the reason is that whilst there was passionate opposition to the invasion of Iraq, making the question of WMD in Iraq a massive political topic, there has never been anything like the same level of popular mobilisation against the overthrow of the Assad government.
Nonetheless I think this is a question which should be answered, if only in order to set the record straight.
Somehow I doubt that it ever will be.
