![]() and its allies have accused the Syrian government of using sarin gas – a potent nerve agent. Everyone we met was at pains to stress there was no deviation from those rules during the recent deployment in Syria to investigate reports of an August 21 gas attack on the rebel-controlled outskirts of Damascus. Ontal walked us through the OPCW's warehouse and explained the inspectors' rules of operations. The information we get is what's going to inform the inspectors about the kind of protective equipment they are going to wear." ![]() "We want to know what the target site looks like we want to know what we are after. "We try to get as much information as we can about what we are doing," Franz Ontal, OPCW's head of inspector training, recently told CNN, during an exclusive visit to the organization's lab and staging facility in the Netherlands. They have also worked in Iraq, which was the first time its inspectors were sent into a live battlefield. The OPCW's experts have monitored the cataloguing and destruction of chemical weapons in countries ranging from the United States and Russia to Libya. Syria has just applied to join, presenting the OPCW with perhaps the most challenging assignment in its near 20-year history, as the country is still locked in a deadly civil war. ![]() The OPCW is the implementing body of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), an international treaty which bans the possession of chemical weapons, and has been signed and ratified by 189 countries around the world. In fact, nine of the 12 were inspectors from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). weapons inspectors left their hotel to investigate claims of chemical weapons use in the suburbs of Damascus in late August, most of the experts travelling in the convoy of armoured SUVs were not United Nations staff at all. ![]()
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