REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, AMMAN - Syrian opposition has captured the site of a suspected nuclear reactor near the Euphrates river which Israeli warplanes destroyed six years ago, opposition sources in eastern Syria said on Sunday.
Al-Kubar site, around 60 km (35 miles) west of the city of Deir al-Zor, became a focus of international attention when Israel raided it in 2007. The United States said the complex was a North Korean-designed nuclear reactor geared to making weapons-grade plutonium.
Omar Abu Laila a spokesman for the Eastern Joint Command of the Free Syrian Army said the only building the opposition found at the site was a hangar containing at least one Scud missile.
"It appears that the site was turned into a Scud launch base. Whatever structures it had have been buried," he said, adding that three army helicopters airlifted the last loyalist troops before opposition fighters overran the area on Friday.
The Syrian military, which razed the site after the Israeli raid, said the complex was a regular military facility but refused to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency unrestrained access, after the agency said the complex could have been a nuclear site.
The UN investigation appears to have died down since the national revolt against Preident Bashar al-Assad broke out in 2011, with the armed opposition increasingly capturing military sites in rural areas and on the edges of cities. UN inspectors examined the site in June 2008 but Syrian authorities has barred them access since.
Abu Laila said Scuds appear to have been fired from Kubar at rebel-held areas in the province of Homs to the west. The complex, he said, had command and control links with loyalist troops in the city of Deir al-Zor, where Assad's forces have been on the retreat and are now based mainly in and around the airport in the south of the city.
Footage showed fighters inspecting the site and one large missile inside a hangar. One fighter pointed to what he said were explosives placed under the missile to destroy it before attacking forces got to it.
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