IAEA confirms Assad-era reactor works at Deir ez-Zor and accounts for 73 tonnes of uranium metal

The International Atomic Energy Agency has told member states that Syria, under Bashar al-Assad, built an undeclared nuclear reactor in Deir ez-Zor province and failed to report the reactor, a fuel fabrication plant and a fuel store. The confidential safeguards report, seen by Reuters and the Associated Press on 1 September, closes questions that have sat on the Board of Governors' books since Israel bombed the site in 2007.

Inspectors visited several locations in August. On 29 August they watched excavation at Deir ez-Zor. "The cooling infrastructure which has now been uncovered is consistent with that of a nuclear reactor," the agency wrote. Three other spots were functionally tied to that site: conversion or fuel-making, temporary storage of construction material, and a yard used to move material in and out, including for planned reprocessing.

At a connected location the agency verified about 73 metric tonnes of natural uranium metal. Some 55 tonnes are fuel rods with cladding. The rest is scrap and waste. All of it is now under IAEA containment and surveillance. Damascus has said the material will stay in Syria.

What the new authorities gave the inspectors

Assad fell in late 2024. The new government promised cooperation. Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi stood with Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shibani in Damascus on 18 August. The September report praises "transparency and cooperation" and says the agency has now clarified and resolved the outstanding safeguards issues previously reported to the Board.

That sentence is the legal point. For years the IAEA could say it believed Al-Kibar, the 2007 target, was a reactor built with North Korean help. It could not walk the cooling circuits or weigh the fuel. The August visits supplied both. The report states that former Syrian authorities failed to report nuclear material, facilities and activities required under the Non-Proliferation Treaty safeguards agreement.

Iran sits on the other page

A companion paper on Iran, circulated the same day, recorded no comparable progress. The agency repeated that it lacks access it considers necessary. The contrast is deliberate. Syria's new rulers opened holes in the ground. Tehran has not.

The Board meets next week. Syria's file now arrives as a closed historical case with live material still in-country. Seventy-three tonnes of natural uranium metal is not a bomb stock in its present form. It is a safeguards object that has to be guarded, counted and politically owned by a government that did not make it. How Damascus stores that metal, and who pays to keep the seals honest, is the next practical question the report does not answer.