Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Friday that some Syrian chemical weapons have been moved, and the U.S. does not know their location or whether Syrian rebels or Iranians in country have control of them.
"There has been intelligence that there have been some moves that have taken place. Where exactly that’s taken place, we don’t know." Panetta said, in a Pentagon press briefing.
Panetta said that the "main sites" in Syria storing chemical weapons with which the Pentagon is most concerned remain secured by the Syrian military. But there is "some intelligence" that "limited" movements of weapons from other sites have occurred, he said, "for the Syrians to better secure what they – the chemicals."
Panetta's statement follows reporting that Syrian rebels claim to have taken control of a military base that contains chemical weapons.
"But with regards to the movement of some of this and whether or not they’ve been able to locate some of it," he said of U.S. intelligence, "we just don’t know."
President Barack Obama has said the use of chemical weapons in the country would carry major consequences.
The now civil war in Syria was preceded by more than a year violence, in which tens of thousands of Syrians died at the hands of Bashar al-Assad's regime.
As late as March 2011, Sec. Hillary Clinton was still saying many had called Assad "a reformer."