Report: Israel tracking Syria's WMD arsenal
Sunday Times says Israeli special forces engaged in 'secret war' meant to thwart any chemical weapons use by Assad regime
Israel is engaged in a "secret" war meant to stop Syrian President Bashar Assad from using chemical weapons, the Sunday Times reported.
According to the British paper, the "cross-border operation is part of a secret war to trail Syria’s non-conventional armaments and sabotage their development."
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Syria has the largest arsenal of chemical and biological weapons in the world. The escalating civil war has sparked concerns that Assad's WMDs may find their ways to terror groups such as Hezbollah.
The international community is also greatly concerned about the possibility that Assad may use his nonconventional weapons on his own people.
"For years we've known the exact location of Syria’s chemical and biological munitions," an Israeli source told the paper, "But in the past week we’ve got signs that munitions have been moved to new locations."
Syria's nonconventional weapons program, which ahs been closely monitored by the West since the early 1980s, was led by Anatoly Kuntsevich, a Russian scientist, who died in 2003.
Another Russian scientist involved in the Syrian program, Yuri Ivanov, died in Syria in 2010, under "mysterious circumstances."
Jill Bellamy-van Aalst, a former bio-defense consultant to NATO was quoted by the Sunday Times as saying that Syria considers chemical weapons as "Just another type of weapon for the regime and they may not make the moral distinctions we do."
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