WASHINGTON – With concern over the Syrian regime's chemical weapons stockpile growing this week, international experts are cautioning against alarmism, saying there's no confirmation that the Syrians are mixing weapons components or loading them into delivery systems, as some reports have said.

Experts in the United States and Europe who monitor unconventional weapons said that President Bashar Assad's embattled regime certainly has moved parts of his nation's vast acknowledged chemical arsenal. But that movement could be interpreted as reassuring rather than alarming, the experts said, if the intention is to keep the weapons from extremists in the anti-Assad movement who are at the forefront of recent rebel advances.

Syria has denied that it plans to deploy chemical weapons, likening such a move to "suicide" because of U.S.-led warnings that doing so would invite Western intervention in the nearly 2-year-old conflict.

"I'm skeptical about sarin being prepared or artillery shells being filled. I've just seen too much in the past with satellite photography making assumptions about chemical weapons, most infamously in Iraq," said Greg Thielmann, a senior fellow at the Arms Control Association in Washington and an early skeptic of U.S. claims that Iraq had built up a chemical weapons arsenal before the U.S. invasion in 2003.

At the time, Thielmann was acting director for the State Department office responsible for analyzing the Iraqi weapons threat. No such weapons were found once U.S. troops had vanquished Iraqi forces.

Unlike the debate over whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, there's no dispute that Syria has amassed a chemical arsenal. Assad admitted as long ago as January 2009 that his government had chemical weapons. Even before then, those who studied the issue had believed for years that Syria had a strategic capacity – including VX, mustard and sarin gases – which the regime billed as a counter to Israel's alleged nuclear arsenal.

But many who study the topic worry that the talk has gone beyond what the facts warrant, and there are concerns that the intelligence hasn't really shown much change in recent months.

Jean Pascal Zanders, a senior research fellow at the European Union Institute for Security Studies and one of the world's leading experts on chemical weapons, wrote in an email from Brussels that he has "concern that the Syrian chemical weapons threat is being ratcheted up to justify military intervention in a not-too-distant future."

Gregory D. Koblentz, an expert on chemical terrorism for the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, noted that there are tactical reasons not to use chemical weapons in a civil war.

With battle lines fluid and supporters and enemies occupying almost the same space, deploying chemical weapons runs the risk of a disastrous backfire if, say, the wind shifts or an engine misfires.

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