IAEA puts 73 tonnes of Assad-era uranium under seal and closes its Syria file

The International Atomic Energy Agency has placed about 73 metric tonnes of natural uranium metal from the Assad years under its own containment and surveillance and told member states it has now resolved the safeguards questions that sat on the Syria file for 18 years. The confidential reports went out on 1 September, ahead of the Board of Governors meeting this week.

Of that 73 tonnes, about 55 tonnes were finished fuel rods with cladding. The rest was scrap and waste. Fuel rods at that stage are not a construction-site curiosity. They are the load a reactor needs before it can approach criticality. IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi had already said in Damascus that the uranium could be misused if it stayed unaccounted for.

Inspectors visited the Deir ez-Zor site on 28 and 29 August to watch excavation of the complex Israel destroyed in September 2007. The new report says the cooling works now uncovered are consistent with a nuclear reactor. It also lists a fuel fabrication plant and a storage site that the former government never declared under Syria's NPT safeguards agreement.

What the 2007 strike hit

The CIA assessment declassified in 2008 said the building was a North Korean-assisted copy of Yongbyon, the reactor used to make plutonium for North Korea's weapons programme. For years the IAEA could not prove the point on the ground because Assad's government demolished the rubble and blocked access. The new authorities in Damascus, after Assad's fall in late 2024, opened the file.

Grossi and Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani had already confirmed the uranium stocks existed about two weeks before the written report. The September paper is the first itemised count. The agency says all of the material is now under its seals and cameras. Syria has said the metal will stay in the country.

The report praises the new government's transparency. It states that, with the information and access now given, the agency has clarified and resolved the outstanding safeguards issues previously reported to the Board. That sentence is the formal close of the old Syria investigation.

Iran sits on the next page

A companion report on Iran, sent the same day, said there had been no comparable progress. The agency repeated that it still lacks access it considers necessary. The pairing is deliberate. One file opened after a government fell. The other remains shut while a war and a safeguards fight run in parallel.

Natural uranium metal is not bomb-grade. It is also not scrap in the ordinary sense when 55 tonnes of it are already clad as fuel. The practical questions now are storage, conversion and who guards the store in a country that is still at war with itself in places. Those questions belong to Damascus and to the IAEA inspectors who now have a seal on the drums.

The Board will take the Syria paper this week as a completed item. The Iran paper will not be marked the same way.