Senior Israeli defense official Amos Gilad told Israel’s Army Radio that Syria’s chemical weapons are still secure, even though Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad is not in control of most of the country. He said the 21-month-old civil war is deadlocked and that Israel is concerned about what could come after Al-Assad. “Suppose he (Al-Assad) does leave, there could be chaos…in the Middle East you never know who will come instead,” Gilad said. “We need to stay level-headed; the entire world is dealing with this. At the moment, chemical weapons are under control.” Syria sits on Israel’s northern border, and Israeli officials are worried that chemical weapons could end up in the hands of Hizbullah guerillas in south Lebanon. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said this weekend that international efforts to get Al-Assad to quit are likely to fail. Lavrov also said that Russia had said no to requests from unnamed countries in the Middle East to pressure Assad to step down or offer him a safe haven. Activists say some 44,000 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in the fighting and hundreds of thousands of refugees have fled.