Syrian Deputy Prime Minister Qadri Jamil this week dismissed as mere election politics President Obama's implicit threat to intervene should the Syrian regime deploy its chemical weapons stockpile. (Andrey Smirnov, AFP/Getty Images / ) 
 
 WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has made contingency plans to send small teams of special operations troops into Syria if the White House decides it needs to secure chemical weapons depots now controlled by security forces loyal to President Bashar Assad, senior U.S. officials said. 
 
 President Obama warned this week that any effort by Assad to move or use his arsenal of chemical munitions in the country's conflict would cross a "red line," implying it could prompt swift U.S. intervention. 
 
 But Pentagon planners are more focused on protecting or destroying any Syrian stockpiles that are left unguarded and at risk falling into the hands of rebel fighters or militias aligned with Al Qaeda, Hezbollah or other militant groups. 
 
 Securing the sites would probably involve stealthy raids by special operations teams trained to handle such weapons, and precision airstrikes to incinerate the chemicals without dispersing them in the air, the officials said. U.S. satellites and drone aircraft already maintain partial surveillance of the sites. 
 
 U.S. intelligence agencies believe Syria has over the years produced or acquired hundreds of tons of sarin nerve agent and mustard gas, a blister agent, and has sought to develop VX, another powerful nerve gas. The toxicity of some chemical agents degrades significantly over time, so it is unclear how lethal the stockpiles are. 
 
 Experts say the chemical agents are stored in bunkers and other sites around the country. Four production facilities are near the cities of Aleppo, Hama and Homs, all tinderboxes in the 17-month uprising, as well as the coastal city of Latakia, an area considered a stronghold for Assad's Alawite religious sect. 
 
 An unclassified report by the director of national intelligence this year said Syria's chemical agents "can be delivered by aerial bombs, ballistic missiles and artillery rockets." But Syrian rockets, including Scud missiles procured from North Korea, are notoriously inaccurate, making them ineffective for delivering a heavy concentration of toxic chemicals to a specific target. 
 
 They can be very effective, however, at creating chaos. 
 
 "The actual killing may be less important than the panic they would induce," said Leonard Spector, who heads the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. 
 
 Although he did not make an explicit threat, Obama's comments at the White House on Monday were widely seen as a direct warning to Assad that the U.S. would take military action if necessary to stop the use of chemical weapons. But officials said later that no large-scale U.S. intervention is likely unless it is part of an international coalition. 
 
 "You shouldn't interpret what Obama said to mean that there would be automatic military action, but rather that we would respond as part of an international effort," said one senior official. 
 
 Officials said Obama could make a unilateral decision, however, to order special forces teams to stop weapons of mass destruction from falling into the wrong hands. 
 
 Pentagon officials and senior military officers said the Syrian stockpiles seem well guarded for now, and they stressed that the White House has not ordered detailed planning of operations aimed at securing the facilities. 
 
 "We have done contingency planning but we're not doing detailed planning — identifying numbers [of troops], units and platforms — until the White House tells us we need a specific plan for this," a senior officer said. 
 
 Although U.S. officials said they are closely monitoring the unconventional weapons sites, they also acknowledge the stockpiles are large enough that some materials, such as small artillery shells filled with chemical agents, could be relocated without their knowledge. 
 
 U.S. officials told reporters last month that they had evidence Syrian forces were moving some chemical arms, apparently to keep them away from areas of fighting. 
 
 Assad's government has said it will not use chemical munitions against the Syrian people, though it has implied they could be used if foreign troops sought to intervene in the war. 
 
 "Any chemical or bacterial weapon will never be used — and I repeat will never be used — during the crisis in Syria, regardless of the developments," Jihad Makdissi, a Syrian government spokesman, told reporters last month. "These weapons are stored and secured by Syrian military forces and under its direct supervision and will never be used unless Syria faces external aggression." 
 
 Analysts say it's unclear how much of the chemical arsenal could be deployed, and they note that the agents, particularly VX and sarin, may have weakened if the regime isn't regularly refilling its stocks. U.S. intelligence officials have said that Syria, which is under international sanctions, relies heavily on foreign sources for chemicals and other key parts of its weapons program. 
 
 The VX stockpiles maintained by former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's government had a shelf life of about six months, and the sarin less than two years, the EU Non-Proliferation Consortium, a network of European think tanks, said in a report last month. 
 
 "To keep those sorts of quantities replenished, you have to have a very robust program," said Charles P. Blair, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Federation of American Scientists, a Washington-based group. 
 
 In response to a reporter's question Monday, Obama mentioned Syria's biological weapons program. But that appears a minor concern at this point. 
 
 In 2008, Army Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, then director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, testified before Congress that Syria had "a program to develop select biological agents as weapons" and that the program was "in the research and development stage." 
 
 U.S. officials no longer appear to believe that Syria is actively pursuing a biological weapons program. The unclassified U.S. intelligence report this year said only that Syria had the infrastructure to support the development of biological weapons. 
 
 david.cloud@latimes.com 
 
 sbengali@latimes.com ||||| * S. Damascus pounded by tank, helicopter, shells -activists * Moscow believes Syria won't use chemical weapons -report * Urban warfare continues unabated in biggest city Aleppo * Fighting rages for control of airfield near Iraq border By Khaled Yacoub Oweis and Oliver Holmes AMMAN/ALEPPO, Syria Aug 22 (Reuters) - The Syrian army shelled southern Damascus on Wednesday and helicopters fired rockets and machineguns during an assault meant to shore up President Bashar al-Assad's grip on the capital 17 months into an uprising, opposition activists said. The army has this week used tanks and helicopter gunships in an offensive around Damascus that coincided with the departure of U.N. military observers, their mission to stop the bloodshed and nudge Syria towards a peaceful transition a failure. The United Nations estimates that more than 18,000 people have been killed in what has become a civil war after the state's violent response to peaceful street protests triggered an armed rebellion in the pivotal Arab country. Anti-Assad activists said at least 47 people had been killed in Damascus in what they called the heaviest bombardment this month. "The whole of Damascus is shaking with the sound of shelling," said a woman in Kfar Souseh, one of several districts hit in the military offensive to root out rebel fighters. The United Nations said some of the weapons being used by government forces appeared to have been supplied by Iran, in violation of a U.N. resolution that banned such exports. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will raise the Syria crisis with Iran at a summit of non-aligned developing nations in Tehran next week, a U.N. spokesman said. As the army continued to shell southern Damascus, activists said at least 22 people had been killed in Kfar Souseh and 25 in the nearby district of Nahr Eisha. One of the dead was named as Mohammad Saeed al Odeh, a journalist employed at a state-run newspaper who was sympathetic to the anti-Assad revolt. Activists said he had been executed in Nahr Eisha. "There are 22 tanks in Kfar Souseh now and behind each one there are at least 30 soldiers. They are raiding houses and executing men," an opposition activist in Kfar Souseh, who gave his name only as Bassam, told Reuters by Skype. More than 250 people, including 171 civilians, were killed across Syria on Tuesday, mostly around Damascus, Aleppo and the southern city of Deraa, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based opposition monitoring group. Activists in the southwestern Damascus suburb of Mouadamiya said Assad's forces had killed 86 people there since Monday, half of them by execution. It was not possible to verify that report. There was no immediate government account of the latest fighting. But state television broadcast footage of weapons it said had been seized from rebels in Mouadamiya, one of the first districts to join the uprising. The conflict, which pits a mainly Sunni Muslim opposition against a ruling system dominated by Assad's Alawite minority, threatens to destabilise neighbours including Lebanon, where Sunni-Alawite violence flared for a third day. The death toll from the fighting in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli rose to at least 10 with more than 100 wounded, medical sources said, in what residents said were some of the fiercest clashes there since Lebanon's 1975-90 civil war. The Syria conflict has revived old tensions in Tripoli between pro-Assad Alawites in the hilltop district of Jebel Mohsen and their Sunni neighbours in Bab al-Tabbaneh below. ALEPPO BATTLES In Syria, Assad's forces have lost swathes of territory in recent months, but have fought back hard in Damascus and in Aleppo, the country's biggest city and commercial hub until it became a theatre for urban warfare. Reuters journalists in Aleppo on Wednesday heard gunfire and shells exploding every minute. Rebels trying to advance in Saif al-Dawla, a front-line Aleppo district, encountered mortar and rocket-propelled grenade fire. At one point, their escape route was cut off by gunfire as tank shells exploded nearby. Much of the area was destroyed. State television said government forces were pursuing "the remnants of armed terrorist gangs." D onatella Rovera, a senior crisis response adviser for A mnesty International, who recently returned from a 10-day visit to Ale ppo, said the rights group in vestigated some 30 attacks in which scores of civilians not involved in hostilities, many of them children, were killed or injured in their homes, while queuing for bread and even in places where those displaced by the conflict were sheltering as a result of indiscriminate attacks against residential neighbourhoods. "The use of imprecise weapons, such as unguided bombs, artillery shells and mortars by government forces has dramatically increased the danger for civilians", Rovera s aid. While the situation at the front line remained difficult, just 400 metres (400 yards) behind it, women and children were walking down the streets casually - some carrying groceries - and just 1 km back streets were bustling with normal life. Children carried groceries from shops doing brisk business and couples held hands as smoke from the fighting rose into the sky behind them. Away from the main cities, government forces fought rebels for control of a military base and airfield near the eastern town of Albu Kamal on the Iraqi border, according to a local Iraqi official and a Syrian rebel commander. The rebel commander, known as Abu Khalid, said his forces now controlled Albu Kamal, straddling a supply route from Iraq where many Sunni tribes sympathise with their Syrian kin. But rebels were on the back foot near the border with Turkey after Syrian soldiers backed by helicopters attacked a village to try to cut off a supply line, opposition sources said. At least three people were killed and 10 wounded when army helicopters bombarded Qastoun, a village in Hama province, 24 kms (15 miles) east of the Turkish border, and rebels fought loyalist troops, the Hama Revolutionary Council said. As Syria slips deeper into chaos, the United States and Israel have voiced concern that Assad might lose control of his chemical weapons arsenal or even be tempted to use it. Russia, a Syrian ally since Soviet times, believes Syria has no intention of using its chemical weapons and is able to safeguard them, the Russian newspaper Kommersant reported on Wednesday, citing an unidentified Foreign Ministry official. U.S. President Barack Obama threatened Assad on Monday with "enormous consequences" if he employed chemical weapons or even if he moved them in a menacing way, drawing a warning from Russia against any unilateral action by the West. In telephone conversations with Obama and French President Francois Hollande, British Prime Minister David Cameron discussed "how to build on the support already given to the opposition to end the appalling violence in Syria," Cameron's office said. The White House said Obama conveyed his concerns on the call about the "increasingly dire humanitarian situation in Syria," and the need for contributions to humanitarian appeals in the region. Lakhdar Brahimi, the incoming U.N. mediator on Syria, met representatives of the Free Syrian Army in Paris on Wednesday. The group said it was sceptical he would succeed where his predecessor - Kofi Annan - had failed. "Foreign intervention that is not through a Security Council resolution is something that very seldom works," Brahimi told Finnish public broadcaster YLE. "My instinct is to say please, let's see if we can solve this problem without external military intervention."
– If the Syrian regime falls, the US plans to deploy troops to stop its chemical weapons from becoming a first-come, first-served bonanza for insurgent groups, senior officials say. Plans are in place to secure the sites if necessary, a move that would probably involve teams of special forces operatives entering the country to guard sites as well as precision airstrikes to incinerate other locations without releasing poisons into the air, the Los Angeles Times reports. The Pentagon fears that stockpiles left unguarded could fall into the hands of rebels linked to al-Qaeda or other Islamic extremists. American satellites and drones are already watching the sites, which are believed to hold hundreds of tons of sarin gas and other nerve agents. Earlier this week, President Obama warned Bashar al-Assad's regime that the US considers the using or moving of chemical weapons a "red line" beyond which military force could be used. Activists say hundreds of people have been killed in continued fighting this week, including many civilians in army shelling of southern Damascus, Reuters reports.