Syrian opposition has post-Assad plan

The Syrian opposition has apparently set up a contingency plan for the fall of president Bashar al-Assad, that addresses the hours after the collapse of his regime. The plan places an urgent priority on security and the government's arsenal of chemical weapons. A senior officer in the Syrian opposition claims a committee has been established to prepare for the inevitable chaos that will follow the collapse of the Assad regime after more than 40 years. One of the militia's first actions will be to seize control of the country's chemical warfare stockpile, which is thought to be one of the largest in the world and contain deadly chemical agents such as Sarin and the nerve agent VX. "We have divided the aftermath into four periods with different priorities for each day. The first period is the first day, the first hours after Assad's control breaks down, and one of the priorities during those hours is taking control of the chemical weapons so they won't fall into the hands of terrorists," the Syrian opposition source told Israeli daily Haaretz. "We know the locations of the chemical weapon stores and we will be ready to move and secure them quickly. I can't promise that nothing will be removed but we have our information and it is not so simple to move around chemical weapons." The opposition leader, a defector from the Syrian Army, justified his decision speak to the Israeli publication anonymously because the "countries are still officially at war".