Syrian President Bashar Assad during a meeting with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran on Aug. 19, 2009
International inspectors said Thursday that they have verified 22 of Syria’s 23 publicly declared chemical weapon sites.
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the United Nations visited 21 of the sites this month, the Associated Press reports. Two others were in regions that posed security concerns due to ongoing fighting. The Syrian government provided photographic and video evidence proving to inspectors’ satisfaction that one of one of the facilities, in the Aleppo region, had been dismantled and abandoned.
The location of the second unvisited site has not yet been disclosed.
More than 100,000 people have died in the country’s two-and-a-half-year civil war. Inspectors are verifying and destroying Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons as part of a deal to avert American military intervention after an August chemical weapons attack outside Damascus.