Syria, in a policy reversal, has offered to cooperate fully with the UN atomic agency, which wants to inspect a suspected nuclear reactor site that was bombed by Israeli warplanes in 2007, diplomats said. The move comes as Western nations were pushing to report Syria to the UN Security Council for its uncooperative stance. Damascus had insisted the site known as Dair Alzour was a military, non-nuclear complex before it was destroyed in 2007. But that assertion by Syria — which is also facing Western sanctions over a violent crackdown on pro-democracy unrest in the country — was rejected in an IAEA report on May 24 which said Dair Alzour was “very likely” to have been a reactor.
US intelligence reports said the desert site was a nascent, North Korean-designed reactor intended to produce plutonium for atomic bombs. Damascus has rebuffed repeated requests by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for follow-up access to the site after a one-off inspection in 2008. The United States and its European allies were expected to seize on the IAEA report’s finding to lobby for a resolution by the agency’s 35-nation board, meeting on June 6-10 in Vienna, to send the Syrian file to the Security Council in New York.