© Moadamiyeh Media Center/EPAAn Aug. 26,, 2013, photo released by the Syrian opposition Moadamiyeh Media Center is said to show U.N. inspectors collecting samples from a site that was allegedly hit by a chemical gas weapon, in Moadamiyeh suburb, Damascus, Syria.
The award caught much of the world by surprise, as did last year's prize, which went to the European Union. But the removal of chemical weapons from Syria has been viewed as an important step in bringing an end to a two-and-a-half year war that has killed an estimated 100,000 people.
"Disarmament figures prominently in Alfred Nobel's will," the committee said, recalling the extensive use of chemical weapons in World War I and their use by states and terrorists alike.
Chemical weapons visit a particular horror on victims, and to those watching from around the world. Awarding the prize to the OPCW may be seen as a resounding vote to end the scourge of chemical weapons once and for all.
OPCW inspectors returned to Syria at the beginning of the month. The 20-member team faces great danger as it attempts to find and oversee the destruction of 1,000 tons of chemical weapons. The team is accompanied by unarmed U.N. security forces and guarded by Syrian government forces, which are not in control of the entire country.
Not only are the inspectors attempting to operate in the middle of a civil war, they are working with a Syrian government that has been reluctant to embrace outside monitors. The challenge is "kind of like asking a weekend runner to run a sub-three-minute mile," Amy Smithson, a chemical weapons expert at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, told The Washington Post recently. "The OPCW is very much accustomed to routine inspections."
The OPCW was created in 1997 as the enforcement arm of the Chemical Weapons Convention, the agreement that prohibits countries around the world from producing and using chemical weapons. It has mostly been occupied with affirming that countries like the United States and Russia, which had the largest stockpiles of chemical weapons, were following through on their promises to destroy them.
Their operation in Syria was set off by a Russian diplomatic initiative, which proposed persuading Syria to give up its chemical weapons in exchange for United States backing off plans to bomb the country. The United States was considering air strikes after a suspected chemical weapons attack in the Damascus suburbs on Aug. 21 that killed more than 1,000 people.
The Nobel committee does not reveal the identities of any of the other nominees when it awards the prize, and information about them is sealed for 50 years. But the committee did report a record number of candidates this year: 259, of which 50 are organizations. The previous record was in 2011, when there were 241 nominees.
Comment: Their operation in Syria was set off by a Russian diplomatic initiative, which proposed persuading Syria to give up its chemical weapons in exchange for United States backing off plans to bomb the country.