Destruction of chemical arms begins

International inspectors began destroying Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons and the machinery used to create it, a United Nations official said yesterday, racing under a tight deadline aiming to eliminate president Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons programme within nine months.

The move kicks off the ambitious programme, prompted by a chemical weapons attack in mid-August that killed hundreds of civilians on the outskirts of Damascus and brought a rare consensus at the UN. Under a Security Council resolution in September, the first stage is to destroy Syria’s capability to produce chemical weapons by Nov 1.

He said that by the end of yesterday, a combination of both weapons and some production equipment would be put out of order.