UNITED NATIONS - The five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council have agreed on a resolution that will require Syria to give up its chemical weapons, but there will be no automatic penalties if the Syrians fail to comply, officials said.
The agreement, hammered out after days of private negotiations, represents a compromise among the United States, its allies and Russia, which had refused to go along with any measure that imposed automatic penalties on Syria if it fails to obey.
But the deal, when finally approved by the 15 members of the Security Council, would amount to the most significant international diplomatic initiative of the Syrian civil war and a new context for President Barack Obama, who had been pushing for a military strike on Syria only to accept a Russian proposal to have Syria relinquish its chemical arsenal.
Western diplomats said the resolution would be legally binding and would stipulate that if Syria failed to abide by the terms, the Security Council would take measures under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, the strongest form of a council resolution. Such measures could include economic sanctions or even military action. But before any action could be taken, the issue would have to go back for debate by the Security Council, on which Russia, like the other permanent members, holds a veto.
Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said in a message on Twitter that the resolution established a “new norm” against the use of chemical weapons.
Mark Lyall Grant, Britain’s ambassador to the United Nations, said in another post that the resolution agreed to by the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France - the permanent members of the Security Council - would be “binding and enforceable.”
The entire 15-member Security Council began to discuss the Syrian resolution Thursday evening.
A vote on the resolution could come as early as today, the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, told reporters Thursday night, so long as the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, based in The Hague, votes on its own Syria measure early today. A formal vote on the measure will not take place until the international organization that monitors compliance with the international treaty banning chemical-weapons drafts procedures for inspecting and eliminating Syria’s vast arsenal of poison gas.
The Syrian resolution was a milestone for the United Nations after years of largely unproductive discussions in the Security Council over the 2 ½-year civil war in Syria, which has killed more than 100,000.
Just three weeks ago, the Obama administration grew openly frustrated at the inability to win Russian support for military action against the government of President Bashar Assad after a chemical-weapons attack Aug. 21 that killed more than 1,400 people.
Power complained then that “there is no viable path forward in this Security Council.”
Now, the council has agreed to a key provision in the resolution stating that “the use of chemical weapons anywhere constitutes a threat to international peace and security.”
Syria, the resolution states, “shall not use, develop, produce, otherwise acquire, stockpile or retain chemical weapons, or transfer, directly or indirectly, chemical weapons to other States or nonstate actors.”
The measure notes that “in the event of noncompliance with this resolution, including unauthorized transfer of chemical weapons, or any use of chemical weapons by anyone in the Syrian Arab Republic,” the Security Council can decided to “impose measures under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter.”
But while Western diplomats were hailing the new resolution as a breakthrough, much will depend on how it is ultimately implemented.
According to the resolution, the director general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the watchdog organization that polices the international treaty banning chemical weapons, or the secretary-general of the United Nations would report any violations to the Security Council.
The Security Council would then discuss the measures to impose for Syria’s noncompliance.
Syria’s entire arsenal is to be eliminated by the middle of 2014, according to a “framework” agreement that was negotiated by the United States and Russia earlier this month a process that Assad has said would take a year, but could take less time than that, according to U.S. and Russian officials.
The officials now believe that the vast majority of Syria’s nerve agent stockpile consists of “unweaponized” liquid precursors that could be neutralized relatively quickly, lowering the risk that the toxins could be hidden away by the regime or stolen by terrorists.
A confidential assessment by the two governments also concludes that Syria’s entire arsenal could be destroyed in about nine months, assuming that Syrian officials honor promises to surrender control of its chemical assets to international inspectors, according to two people briefed on the analysis.
The assessment, thought to be the most authoritative to date, reflects the consensus view of Russian and U.S. analysts who compared their governments’ intelligence on Syria during meetings in Geneva this month. The Obama administration has since briefed independent experts on the key findings.
Also on Thursday, an al-Qaida commander was killed in northern Syria in ongoing clashes with Kurdish militiamen, the second to die in a week of infighting between extremist and moderate rebel factions.
U.N. experts resumed their probe into the use of chemical weapons in Syria’s civil war, but the rebel-against-rebel violence may further complicate their work on the ground.
The intensifying power struggle between disparate factions fighting to topple Assad is threatening to further encumber a rebellion plagued by divisions and outgunned by the regime.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an al-Qaida offshoot consisting mostly of foreign fighters, has sought to expand its influence in opposition held territories, employing brutal tactics and trying to impose Islamic law.
That has created a backlash against the group from more moderate factions concerned that extremists are discrediting their rebellion.
Highlighting the militants’ push, activists said members of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant broke the crosses off two churches and burned the contents of another in the northeastern city of Raqqa, hoisting in their place their group’s black Islamic banner.
The action triggered a protest by residents of Raqqa, which fell into rebel hands last year and has since been controlled mostly by extremist factions, according to a resident of the city who identified himself only by his first name, Amir, for fear of reprisals.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirmed the incident.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant commander was killed in clashes with Kurdish militiamen in Aleppo province, activists said. Fighting between the two sides in predominantly Kurdish regions of the north has gone on for months, killing hundreds of people on both sides.
The man, identified by the Observatory as a United Arab Emirates national and the emir - or local commander - of Aleppo, died Wednesday night.
Russia, meanwhile, offered Thursday to provide troops to guard facilities where Syria’s chemical weapons would be destroyed.
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Moscowis ready to ensure security and help guard facilities, once the chemical weapons are stored for destruction in Syria.
He emphasized that Moscow will not accept the Syrian chemical weapons to be dismantled in Russian territory.
“We believe that it should be dismantled on Syrian territory,” Russian news agencies quoted Ryabkov as saying. “We undoubtedly won’t deal with it. We believe that the process of its destruction could be efficiently organized on the territory of Syria.”
In an informal interview with the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar newspaper, Assad said his stockpile was a “burden” he was glad to be rid of.He said Syria initially manufactured chemical weapons as a deterrent to Israel’s nuclear arsenal.
“Today we have much more important and sophisticated deterrent weapons with which we can blind Israel in a moment,” he said.
Also Thursday, a mortar shell slammed into the Iraqi consulate building in central Damascus, killing an Iraqi woman and wounding three, Syrian state media reported.
Information for this article was contributed by Michael R. Gordon, Somini Sengupta and Rick Gladstone of The New York Times; by Albert Aji and Zeina Karam of The Associated Press, and by Joby Warrick and Anne Gearan of The Washington Post.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 09/27/2013