This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

International inspectors have begun destroying Syria's chemical weapons and the machinery used to create them, the United Nations has said.

A UN official said he could not confirm specifically what was being destroyed, but the hardware that would be put out of order by the end of the weekend included weapons and other equipment.

The team has a tight deadline of nine months to destroy the weapons arsenal, believed to include about 1,000 tonnes of toxic agents.

"Today is the first day of the phase of destruction and disabling. Verification will also continue," said the UN official, who works alongside the inspectors.

According to the Associated Press, he added: "The plan was that two types … of materials would be destroyed: one is equipment for making [weapons], filling and mixing equipment, some of it mobile and some of it static. The other is actual munitions."

The destruction programme was prompted by a chemical weapons attack in August that killed hundreds of civilians on the outskirts of Damascus and brought a rare consensus at the UN.

Under a security council resolution in September, the first stage is to destroy Syria's capability to produce chemical weapons by 1 November.

A team from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons was allowed into the country this month. They followed weapons inspectors who arrived in Syria after a deal was struck following the killing of hundreds of civilians near Damascus.

There were threats of military action to force the Assad regime to give up its stockpile, with the United States and France in the lead. But there was heavy opposition from Russia, and a Commons defeat forced David Cameron to concede that Britain would not be involved in any military strike.

Barack Obama avoided the possible ignominy of losing a vote himself when he put his plan for a military strike on hold after Syria's admission that it had chemical weapons.

UN inspectors are now expected to dismantle and ultimately destroy Syria's chemical weapons by mid-2014.

Videos of the dead and dying emerged online soon after sarin weapons were fired into civilian areas near the Syrian capital, prompting global condemnation. The Assad regime and the rebels blame each other.

Last month Obama said: "It is too early to tell whether [the Russian plan] will succeed, and any agreement must verify that the Assad regime keeps its commitments. But this initiative has the potential to remove the threat of chemical weapons without the use of force, particularly because Russia is one of Assad's strongest allies."

In an interview in a state-run newspaper on Sunday, Assad said the Syrian regime had begun producing chemical weapons in the 1980s to "fill the technical gap in the traditional weapons between Syria and Israel". He said production of chemical weapons was halted in the late 1990s, but provided no further information.