IAEA board ends its long-running nuclear investigation of Syria

Fifteen years after it declared Syria in breach of its nuclear obligations, the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) closed the case on Wednesday 9 September 2026. The 35-member Board of Governors of the Vienna-based agency adopted a resolution that terminates its 2011 finding of non-compliance, diplomats told the AFP and Associated Press news agencies. The text was submitted by Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Saudi Arabia and passed without opposition.

The original finding concerned a building at Deir ez-Zor in eastern Syria that Israeli aircraft destroyed in 2007. The IAEA concluded in 2011 that it was very likely a nuclear reactor, built in secret and with indications of North Korean help. The government of Bashar al-Assad levelled the site and never answered the agency’s questions in full.

Assad was overthrown in December 2024, and the authorities that replaced him opened the sites to inspectors. In August 2026 the IAEA’s director general, Rafael Grossi, visited Deir ez-Zor, where excavation confirmed cooling infrastructure consistent with a reactor. Inspectors were also taken to a location the agency had not known about, where they found about 73 tonnes of natural uranium metal, 55 tonnes of it in the form of fuel rods. That material is now under IAEA safeguards.

Grossi said on 7 September that it was “obvious that the previous government was pursuing a number of clandestine” activities, and praised what he called Damascus’s “courageous decision” to report the undisclosed site. Robert Kelley, a former IAEA inspections director now at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, told AFP there was “no evidence of any weapons programme” in Syria itself and that the reactor may have been intended to produce plutonium for North Korea.

Syria’s foreign ministry called the vote “an important diplomatic and legal achievement”. The resolution states that Syria remains bound by its non-proliferation commitments, encourages further excavation at the reactor site and asks Grossi to keep the board informed.