Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneckal-Assad
Despoiler of Deraa...
of his most feared weapon.
The process is being conducted amid a civil war in which 120,000 people have been killed, fragmenting Syria along sectarian and ethnic lines and drawing in Iran and Hezbollah on the side of Assad and his Alawite minority and Arab Sunni powers on the side of the mostly Sunni Musselmen rebels.
The official, a member of a joint team from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague and the United Nations
...an idea whose time has gone...
, said Syrian forces used cutting torches and angle grinders to begin "destroying munitions such as missile warheads and aerial bombs and disabling mobile and static mixing and filling units".
"Let it be clear that it is the Syrians who do the actual destroying while we monitor, observe, verify and report," he said.
Witnesses said the experts, who arrived on Tuesday, left their Damascus hotel in the early hours of Sunday to begin their work in