75 suspicious chemical cylinders ended in a mistake at a blacksmith's workshop in Syria.

In the corridors of the UN Security Council, during a session held last Tuesday, what began as a routine diplomatic report turned into the revelation of a highly dangerous security incident recounted for the first time, which took place in a blacksmith's workshop in Syria and nearly became the source of an unforeseen health and environmental disaster.

“In the corridors of the UN Security Council, during a session held last Tuesday, what began as a routine diplomatic report turned into the revelation of a highly dangerous security incident recounted for the first time, which took place in a blacksmith's workshop in Syria and nearly became the source of an unforeseen health and environmental disaster”

Al-Jazeera Net

Through the voice of Syria's permanent representative to the United Nations, Ibrahim Albi, details emerged of a story that began at an abandoned military site and ended under the blacksmiths' hammers.

Al-Jazeera Net

The episode began when units from the Syrian Ministry of Defense found 75 old, empty cylinders suspected of having contained toxic materials from the chemical program during the era of the regime of the deposed Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

As part of what Albi described as Syria’s commitment stemming from a “deep loyalty to the suffering of the Syrian people,” the Syrian National Committee acted with full transparency: it immediately notified the Technical Secretariat of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and proposed transferring some of these cylinders to the OPCW headquarters in The Hague to present them as a “success story” embodying the spirit of cooperation.

Al-Jazeera Net

The OPCW Technical Secretariat asked to “hold off” on moving the cylinders for reasons related to safety protocols, but due to a sudden breakdown in coordination on the ground, these instructions did not reach the workers cleaning the military site in time.

“In the corridors of the UN Security Council, during a session held last Tuesday, what began as a routine diplomatic report turned into the revelation of a highly dangerous security incident recounted for the first time, which took place in a blacksmith's workshop in Syria and nearly became the source of an unforeseen health and environmental disaster”

Al-Jazeera Net

To the cleaning crews, the cylinders were nothing more than old metal occupying space, and in a spontaneous action fraught with deadly risk, the workers moved all 75 cylinders to a local blacksmith's shop to deal with them.

In the blacksmith's workshop, without any protective equipment or awareness of the nature of the materials that might be embedded in the walls of those cylinders, the workers began dismantling and destroying them completely to convert them into metal “scrap” for sale, exposing everyone involved to grave health dangers and opening the possibility of releasing residual, silent poisons.

Once Syrian authorities understood what had happened, they declared a state of alert, and the relevant bodies hurried to contact the OPCW Technical Secretariat again.

Specialist teams, accompanied by international inspectors, raced against time to the blacksmith's workshop.

Al-Jazeera Net

The cylinders were counted and confirmed to be present in full (75 cylinders), but only after they had been reduced to destroyed pieces.

A cordon of strict safety measures was immediately imposed to ensure no contamination, and to close the investigation transparently, Damascus provided the Organization with substantive information, including detailed interviews with the blacksmiths and the workers who dismantled the cylinders, as well as site samples taken for testing.

This incident highlights the scale of the challenge Syria faces in clearing the legacy of the past.

The Syrian representative noted that his country has opened more than 25 suspected sites, provided over 10,000 original documents, and arranged interviews with 19 witnesses.

But, according to Albi, the blacksmith workshop incident sends a clear warning to the international community that goodwill and transparency alone are not enough to handle this complex file.

Without genuine international support and the building of national capacities to safely deal with discovered materials, overcoming these challenges will remain incomplete, and any forgotten bit of “scrap” could turn into an imminent disaster.