(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - As the U.N. Security Council plans to meet next week to discuss what to do about Syria's refusal to cooperate with an investigation of its alleged secret nuclear activities, Western sources declared that any sanctions against Syria are unlikely and the return of the Syrian nuclear issue to the Security Council is possible.
Vienna-based correspondent of the Associated Press Goerge Jahn, quoting two Western diplomats has reported that Westerners are concerned about the return of Syria’s nuclear issue to the UN Security Council.
“The move comes just weeks after the International Atomic Energy Agency referred it (the case) to the council. The closed session could result in anything from debate to sanctions of the kind imposed on Iran for defying international demands to cease activities that could be used to make nuclear arms,” the Associated Press reported.
“Two of the diplomats said that influential Western member nations of the IAEA and the agency itself were concerned that the council might simply decide to throw the case back to the agency. That could burden the IAEA with additional work on Syria, they said, and thereby deflect from IAEA efforts to concentrate on Iran. Western powers pushing referral at the June 9 IAEA board meeting had two goals: to show that Syria could not defy the agency and to clear the decks for potential referral of Iran to the council later this year,” the AP report said.
“But if the Security Council asks the IAEA to prepare a new report on Syria, it would need to split its work between Syria and Iran, potentially diluting its efforts on pressuring Tehran to heed international demands for nuclear openness and cooperation," the diplomats told the Associated Press.
"All three diplomats said that the council had asked high-ranking IAEA officials to testify at the hearing - another sign of the importance attached to it. They said that IAEA chief Yukiya Amano and Herman Nackaerts, the agency’s nonproliferation point man, would either both attend or one of them would go. Sanctions are unlikely: Iran continues to expand its nuclear activities in defiance of the council, whereas Syria's alleged violations appeared to have occurred in the past and thus do not seem to represent a present proliferation threat," the AP report added.
Iran based IranNuc.ir website reported in an analysis that Syrian nuclear issue is becoming a headache for the Westerners. The illegal referral of the Syrian nuclear issue to the UN Security Council beside the extreme differences between Russia and China on one hand and US on the other in the case of Libyan uprising and Syrian unrests resulted in explicit disagreement from Beijing and Moscow over new sanctions against Damascus.
Therefore, Washington, unable to achieve its goal in weakening Syrian President Bashar Assad in its bid for pressuring him to leave the resistance movement is facing an impasse.
A law expert in Tehran believes the Americans would not be able to convince the international community and the Security Council that Syria’s nuclear program would pose any threat to international peace and security; because it is a closed case and the alleged nuclear site doesn’t exist now.
Iran’s supreme Leader pointed out in a statement recently that Syrian unrests were different from other uprisings in the Middle East in both roots and nature. Some international observers, as well believe that the West is trying to weaken Assad and pressure him to abandon his support for the regional resistance movement against the Zionist regime including Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
The IAEA has tried in vain since 2008 to follow up on strong evidence that a site in the Syrian Desert, bombed in 2007 by Israeli warplanes, was a nearly finished reactor built with North Korea's help.
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