There appears to be some urgency to the CIA's mission to find Syria's chemical and biological weapons stash. When you consider how active Al-Qaeda in Iraq has been in Syria as well as the Muslim Brotherhood, you can understand why.

The Daily Beast:

Obama administration officials tell The Daily Beast that the CIA has sent officers to the region to assess Syria's weapons program. One major task for the CIA right now is to work with military defectors to find out as much information on Syria's weapons of mass destruction, according to one U.S. official with access to Syrian intelligence. Another focus will be to sort through reams of intercepted phone calls and emails, satellite images, and other collected intelligence to find the exact locations of the Syrian weapons, this official said.  

This task has become more urgent in recent days. Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Syrian military was moving its chemical weapons out of storage. On July 17, Nawaf Fares, Syria's ex-ambassador to Iraq, told the BBC the regime would not hesitate to use chemical weapons against the rebel fighters. On Wednesday, a bomb killed the Syrian defense minister and the brother-in-law of President al-Assad in Damascus. The blow to the al-Assad cabinet raised the prospect that the Syrian regime may be on its last legs.

Rep. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, declined to provide details on what intelligence assets have been sent to Syria or to say whether the CIA has sent officers on the ground there. He said that the administration had recently deployed "the resources necessary to collect the information that we need to make a good decision on chemical and biological [weapons], opposition groups and leadership transition strategies." But, he added, "We don't know nearly what we need to know to be completely effective if the regime were to implode tomorrow." 

A CIA spokesman Thursday declined to comment.

There is also the belief that if the Assad regime begins to totter, he won't hesitate to use chemical and perhaps even biological weapons on his opponents. And if the weapons have been scattered throughout Syria, as may be the case, the chances of terrorists getting their hands on them goes way up.

Then there's the question of what, if any, WMD Iraq transferred to Syria before the war:

Also unclear is what, if anything, Iraq transferred to Syria before the 2003 U.S. invasion. "That is the wild card," said DeSutter.

Whether or not sensitive weapons technology was moved to Syria is a hotly disputed question in the intelligence community. James Clapper, now the Director of National Intelligence and formerly the director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, said in 2003 that he believed materials had been moved out of Iraq in the months before the war and cited satellite imagery.

Recall that these are the stockpiles of WMD that Saddam never had.

Assad is currently in little danger of being toppled, but the command and control of his army may be weakened and whether he has total control of the WMD is unknown.