Israel threatened a second strike on “Site 99” and suspected Turkish assistance to Damascus before Washington handed the file to the UN watchdog
The United States has brokered an arrangement under which the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will remove nuclear material left over from Syria’s dismantled weapons programme, defusing a stand-off that had drawn in Israel and raised suspicions in Jerusalem about Turkey.
The arrangement, first reported by Axios on 10 August, centres on a clandestine facility Israeli and American officials call “Site 99.” Two Israeli officials cited in the report said the Assad regime stored there material connected to the Al-Kibar reactor project, including yellowcake — a uranium ore concentrate that can be further processed and eventually enriched — plus other residue from the destroyed reactor.
The material cannot produce a nuclear detonation. The concern was narrower: that radioactive substances could be combined with conventional explosives in a so-called dirty bomb.
Israeli officials said the Israel Defense Forces bombed the entrances to the site shortly after Assad’s fall in December 2024 to seal off access. For more than a year afterwards, the White House National Security Council and its Israeli counterpart argued over what to do next. Israel said it would not tolerate the material remaining in place and warned it might strike again if the stocks were not removed — or if Damascus tried to reach them. A US official countered that Israel was never on the verge of another strike.
The stand-off nearly broke several weeks ago, when Israeli surveillance detected movement around the site. Israeli officials suspected the new Syrian authorities were reneging on prior understandings, and suspected Türkiye — the outside power most closely associated with Ahmed al-Sharaa’s rise — of helping Damascus recover the material. The Trump administration asked Israel to hold fire and brought in the IAEA. An agreement with Damascus followed roughly three weeks ago.
Damascus’s account differs on the choreography. Syria’s Atomic Energy Commission said on 11 August that it was continuing transparent cooperation with the IAEA, the United States and friendly countries to resolve the deposed regime’s legacy, and would receive an agency delegation within days to announce “significant progress.” A Syrian official told Reuters that talks were still under way, that no final agreement had been concluded, and that “there is no Israeli role in this process.”
The episode caps a long-frozen dossier. The IAEA first sought access to Deir ez-Zor in 2008, a year after Israeli aircraft destroyed the reactor Syria had built with North Korean assistance, and its Board of Governors found Damascus in non-compliance with its safeguards obligations in 2011. Assad denied the programme to the end. Access resumed only after Director General Rafael Grossi met al-Sharaa in June 2025 and secured unrestricted entry to four locations. Sampling later revealed anthropogenic natural uranium particles at one of three sites “functionally related” to Deir ez-Zor — identified by the Institute for Science and International Security as Marj as-Sultān, long suspected of undeclared uranium conversion and fuel fabrication.
For al-Sharaa, closing the nuclear file follows the logic of the chemical weapons dossier: inherited liabilities liquidated in exchange for international rehabilitation. For Israel, it removes a target without a strike. That the resolution ran through Washington rather than the Israeli–Syrian security track now under negotiation — and that Ankara surfaced as a suspicion rather than a partner — says much about how thin the region’s new arrangements remain.
The removal has not begun. American officials say they hope to complete it before the end of the year.