The regime of former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was building a nuclear reactor that could likely have been used to produce weapons-grade material, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said on Monday.
IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi said the reactor was almost complete. Only the fuel had yet to be loaded, he told a press conference in Vienna, where the agency’s board of governors is meeting this week.
A few days earlier, the IAEA said in a report that infrastructure matching that of a nuclear reactor had been found in Deir ez-Zor, in eastern Syria. Agency staff visited several sites in the country in August.
Grossi stopped short of explicitly confirming that the nuclear programme had a military purpose. However, he said it was clear to him that the regime did not want the world to know what they were doing.
He added that, given the design and technical characteristics of this type of reactor, it was a very efficient reactor for the production of fissile material that could be used directly for the manufacture of nuclear weapons.
Grossi also said he could not rule out the possibility that the Syrian authorities at the time had caused explosions to obstruct any investigation and make it harder to determine precisely what had been at the site.
He welcomed the co-operation and transparency of Syria’s current authorities.
The Deir ez-Zor site has been closed for 18 years. In 2018, Israel acknowledged that it had bombed the site 11 years earlier to destroy a nuclear reactor under construction.
