The countdown has begun on a dangerous, tough mission to eliminate Syria's chemical weapons, with the regime given just seven days to lift the veil on its secret stockpile and allow inspectors into the war-torn country.

In whirlwind, round-the-clock diplomacy in Geneva, the United States and Russia hammered out a landmark framework for dismantling and destroying one of the world's largest stockpiles of chemical arms.

By next Friday President Bashar al-Assad faces his first litmus test of the seriousness of his regime's stated commitment to bring its deadly chemical arms under international control.

The deal hammered out in Geneva has to go first to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to be agreed, but within seven days Assad must put on the table a full declaration of the extent of his long secret programme.

The United States believes Syria is dotted with some 45 sites connected to the chemical weapons programme -- of which nearly half contain "exploitable chemical agents" for mixing toxic gasses.

Questions remain over whether the US and Russia can meet their goal of removing and destroying some 1,000 metric tonnes by mid-2014, but US experts emerging from three days of non-stop talks with Russian counterparts insist it can be done.

"It's very, very difficult, but it's doable," said one US administration official, with another calling it an "ambitious" timetable.

Under the plan, arms inspectors and experts must be given immediate access to the sites in question to begin neutralising them and locking them down. And all initial inspections of sites are due to be completed by November.

One of the most difficult issues though, is that Syria is in the middle of a brutal civil war, which has cost some 110,000 lives since March 2011.

US officials believe that despite the chaotic battle on the ground, the Assad regime has kept tight control of the chemical weapons stocks and they should have relatively easy access to regime-controlled areas.

"The security is still a daunting challenge," said the administration official, adding Pentagon experts have already drawn up options for how weapons experts could protect themselves and the arms sites.

Harnessing enough manpower could also prove difficult, with the United States and Russia committing to try to drum up help -- and funding -- from allies.

"Personnel should be dispatched as soon as possible," said the official, adding they may draw on the expertise of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council.

Many details still need to be worked out, including whether the stocks would be destroyed on site or moved to third country for destruction.

"There are clear advantages and disadvantages to removing some of the agents from Syria. It is potentially faster," said another US official.

"It also has certain risks and costs any time you move weapons or chemicals of this sort," he said, adding it would be premature to identify any of the countries which could be used.

The United States and Russia are the leading experts in the field, having moved to destroy all their chemical weapons under a 1997 deal, and have even developed a mobile destruction unit which can be placed in a country without the proper facilities.

Some chemical weapons are destroyed through a process known as hydrolysis, in which agents, like detergents, are used to neutralize blistering chemicals such as mustard gas and sulphur.

Nerve gases such as sarin are often better destroyed through incineration.

"Production equipment of course is separate from the actual chemicals and there you need a big sledgehammer and some other equipment," the second US official said.

But the exhausted negotiators were exhilarated that in less than three days, they had managed to pull off a deal, which they say gives them a real chance of eliminating Syria's chemical weapons.

The speed at which it all came together was also noteworthy.

Earlier this week, the Russian ambassador to Washington came in "and brought us some ideas, and we had some ideas, but no-one had a full blown plan. No-one," the first US official said.

The Geneva "meeting was put together logistically in 24 hours, so people had to create all of this here," she added.

Apart from their weapons experts and intelligence and security staff, both sides also brought their lawyers.

"At the end of the day the things that most mattered I believed that we got," she said, asked if the US had had to compromise too much.

"Did they agree to every single word we wanted? No. Did we have hard-fought negotiations, yes, or we could have done this in an hour. But we feel we were able to do this, to move forward and do what we set out to do." jkb/yad

Assad on the clock to reveal chemical weapons

Under the deal struck by U.S. and Russia, Syria must lift the veil on its stockpile of illegal arms within a week.
Pact's challenges

If you thought this week has been one of the more precarious of President Obama's second term, you're not alone.

It's not hard to find recriminations of Obama's handling of the crisis in Syria, even among his supporters.

After deciding to go to Congress for authorization to strike Syria for a brazen chemical weapons attack on its own people, Obama has since failed to get even close to the amount of support he needs among lawmakers.

"I think this is an extraordinarily difficult moment," said Kathleen Hall Jameson, a professor of presidential communication at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

"You've got a public that is very skeptical and an international community that is very reluctant to get involved and a country that is keenly aware that you have to make tradeoffs because we don't have enough money to fund all the things we have to fund in government. It's a tough sell."

Kerry Spars With Russia in Syria Talks

On domestic policy, Obama's choice to pursue military intervention has essentially frozen his domestic agenda.

It might be the beginning of a second-term slump for a president who has in the past always seemed to escape, relatively unscathed, from even the most intractable conflicts at home and abroad.

The White House insists that they have had a great week because the Russians and Syrians are on board with a diplomatic resolution because of Obama's relentless push for military action.

And he might yet escape from this one. In the meantime, however, it appears he has staked everything -- his reputation at home and abroad -- on the success of diplomacy with Russia.

Here are five reasons this might have been Obama's longest week:

MUDDLED MESSAGE

He has pulled nearly every media lever available to him, saturating the airwaves with appearances on every TV network -- two nights in a row -- to make his case for action against Syria. But President Obama and his administration have seemed unable to get a coherent message campaign off the ground. It has appeared at times as though the administration has even been flying by the seat of its pants through an international crisis.

Syria, Airstrikes and the News of the Week

After a tense few days with his finger on the trigger, Obama took an unexpected turn toward diplomacy thanks to a reportedly "unscripted" line from Secretary of State John Kerry. The nation's top diplomat suggested at a London news conference that Syria's Bashar al-Assad could avoid a military strike if he turned over all of his chemical weapons.

His aides downplayed the offer as "rhetorical," if off-the-cuff; Kerry said the next day he "didn't misspeak."

Russia pounced on the statement and sparked this latest round of last-ditch talks. But then there's the practical issue of whether the administration believes Syria's chemical weapons can even be removed.

Kerry himself said it "can't be done, obviously." Days later, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said "certainly, it's possible," to get the job done. "No one would suggest that because it's difficult, we shouldn't pursue it," he said.

And then there's the lingering fact that Obama finds himself under pressure to act against Assad because of the off-the-cuff "red line" he laid down one year ago. While Assad had used chemical weapons many times before the Aug. 21 attack, Obama never felt compelled to act. It might be his own promise of "enormous consequences" that now have him in a corner, forced to put the legitimacy of his entire presidency on the line to corral support among lawmakers and a skeptical U.S. public for a military response.

ANOTHER REJECTION IN CONGRESS

President Obama and senior White House staff made direct, personal appeals to more than 450 members of Congress on Syria action, more outreach to Congress since the push for the Affordable Care Act. But if the vote were held today, it would certainly fail.

It's the latest piece of Obama-backed, second-term legislation that has been mired on Capitol Hill. He pushed for immigration overhaul, but the legislation passed the Senate only to be stalled in the House of Representatives with no obvious path forward.

He pushed for gun control after the Newtown Massacre left 26 children and elementary school teachers and staff dead, but Congress rejected a background check bill pushed by the White House.

The other shoe fell this week. Two Democratic lawmakers who supported gun control legislation in the Colorado State Senate were recalled in a National Rifle Association-backed campaign, despite efforts from Democratic groups and unions to save them.

Obama's Syria policy has frozen progress on all other congressional priorities, including an all-important bill to fund the government for the remainder of the year and the debt ceiling, which will be reached next month. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid lamented Thursday as he closed the Senate for business, "This was a wasted week."

PANNED SPEECH

Obama's Tuesday primetime speech was the venue that many thought he would use to make his case for military action convincingly to the American public. But with more than 32 million people watching, according to Nielson, many thought it was a missed opportunity.

Indeed, it inflamed some of the few supporters of his military plan and the many opponents.

"The president just seems to be very uncomfortable being commander in chief of this nation," Sen. Bob Corker, a supporter of Obama's push for military action, vented to CNN Wednesday. "It's just a complete muddlement."

Professor Jameson said the speech was part of a failed communication strategy on the part of the White House.

"The speech is well written, the speech is well argued, it was delivered well; the problem is the speech didn't need to be given," Jameson said. "The fact is the speech was decided on before ongoing events overtook the need for the speech."

A former Obama spokesman wrote that the primetime address actually played to one of Obama's greatest weakness, not his greatest strength.

"When Obama squares to the lens, he seems to lose grasp of the energy that makes him an engaging speaker at other times," Reid Cherlin wrote this week in The New Republic. "He may be able to melt a crowd with an Al Green line, but when he addresses us directly through the screen, he is nearly always flat and lifeless.

PUTIN'S PLAY FOR POWER

Russian President Vladimir Putin, not one to miss an opportunity to vie for the upper hand, penned an op-edin The New York Times that cited the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, suggesting that Obama should abandon "American exceptionalism."

"It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States," Putin wrote. "Is it in America's long-term interest? I doubt it."

Conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer suggested this week that the editorial directly reflected on Obama's leadership.

"These are the fruits of a completely incompetent, epically incompetent foreign policy diplomacy by Obama," Krauthammer said on Fox News. "I mean, this, what we're seeing here is Putin so confident of himself after Obama had to acquiesce to this face-saving negotiation that he could actually engage in this."

Despite Putin's suggestion, contrary to U.S. evidence, that Assad didn't use chemical weapons in the Aug. 21 attack, Andrew Kuchins, director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said when a U.N. report on Syria is release next week, Putin might suddenly appear far less in control of the situation.

"It may appear that [Putin] has the upper hand now, but if there's more evidence to suggest the Russian position about what happens on Aug. 21 is untenable," Kuchins said, "then the upper hand comes back to us."

The toughest week of Obama's second term?

It's not hard to find recriminations of his handling of the crisis in Syria, even among supporters.
Chance to counter Putin

WASHINGTON (AP) — Two Republican senators who are among President Barack Obama's sharpest foreign policy critics on Saturday blasted a Syrian chemical weapons agreement as "an act of provocative weakness" by America that will embolden enemies such as Iran as it continues its push for a nuclear weapon.

The House Democratic leader said the deal, under which Syria will be expected to put its stockpile of chemical weapons under international control before they ultimately are destroyed, represented "significant progress" in efforts by the U.S. to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction.

"What concerns us most is that our friends and enemies will take the same lessons from this agreement: They see it as an act of provocative weakness on America's part," Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said in a joint statement. "We cannot imagine a worse signal to send to Iran as it continues its push for a nuclear weapon."

The Obama administration and many lawmakers — including McCain and Graham — blame Syria for the deaths of more than 1,400 people last month in a chemical weapons attack near the capital of Damascus. But the two sides parted company on whether the U.S. should take military action in response, as Obama had said he was prepared to do before he tossed the issue to Congress for a vote.

Many lawmakers opposed the military option, while McCain and Graham were among those supporting it.

But what the two senators do not support is the agreement their former colleague, Secretary of State John Kerry, announced Saturday in Geneva after days of tense talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. The deal calls for securing and destroying Syria's chemical weapons stockpile and imposing penalties if the government of President Bashar Assad fails to comply with its terms. The agreement was the result of a surprise proposal by Syria's staunch ally, Russia.

McCain and Graham said a U.N. Security Council resolution, one of the next steps in the process, that doesn't threaten Assad with the use of force if his government fails to comply will render the agreement meaningless. Senior administration officials said Friday that Obama would be open to a U.N. resolution that omits the threat of military force for failing to abide by the agreement, largely because Russia, a permanent member of the council, would veto any measure that includes a military trigger. Russia has vetoed past attempts by the council to take action against Syria.

The administration officials said Obama retains the authority to launch a strike.

McCain and Graham also argued that Assad will use the time the agreement gives him to delay and deceive the world.

"It requires a willful suspension of disbelief to see this agreement as anything other than the start of a diplomatic blind alley, and the Obama administration is being led into it by Bashar Assad and (Russian President) Vladimir Putin," the senators said.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California, who supported Obama, credited the president's "steadfast leadership" for "making significant progress in our efforts to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction." She also credited Obama's "clear and credible" threats to use force against Syria for making the agreement possible.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., said eliminating Syria's chemical weapons cache is a better outcome than just deterring and degrading Assad's ability to use them, which Obama had said was the goal of the limited military operation he envisioned.

"It is important for everyone, but especially for Syria and Russia, to keep in mind that as the president said, the United States remains prepared to act if Syria does not implement this agreement. Russia and Syria sought two things in any agreement: a promise on our part not to use military force, and an end to international support for the Syrian opposition. This agreement includes neither item," Levin said.

"Just as the credible threat of a strike against Syria's chemical capability made this framework agreement possible, we must maintain that credible threat to ensure that Assad fully complies with the agreement," he said.

Sen. Angus King of Maine, an independent who sits on both the Intelligence and Armed Services committees, voiced the sentiments of lawmakers in both houses when he said "a diplomatic solution to eliminate (Assad's) chemical weapons capabilities is preferable to a military one." King said he was encouraged by the development and looked forward to the process moving ahead.

McCain and Graham argued anew for more robust assistance from the Obama administration to opposition forces that have been fighting for more than two years to topple Assad. They said the deal doesn't do anything to solve a civil war that has killed more than 100,000 people and turned millions of Syrians into refugees.

"Is the message of this agreement that Assad is now our negotiating partner, and that he can go on slaughtering innocent civilians and destabilizing the Middle East using every tool of warfare, so long as he does not use chemical weapons?" they said. "That is morally and strategically indefensible."

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BOULDER, Colo. (AP) — As rescuers broke through to flood-ravaged Colorado towns, they issued a stern warning Saturday to anyone thinking of staying behind: Leave now or be prepared to endure weeks without electricity, running water and basic supplies.

National Guard helicopters and truck convoys carried the admonition into paralyzed canyon communities where thousands of stranded residents were eager to escape the Rocky Mountain foothills. But not everybody was willing to go. Dozens of people in the isolated community of Jamestown wanted to stay to watch over their homes.

Authorities made clear that residents who chose not to leave might not get another chance for a while. Rescuers won't go back for people who insist on staying, Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle said.

"We're not trying to force anyone from their home. We're not trying to be forceful, but we're trying to be very factual and definitive about the consequences of their decision, and we hope that they will come down," Pelle said.

Special education teacher Brian Shultz, 38, was torn about leaving his Jamestown home.

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Farm buildings stand in fields submerged by flooding along the South Platte River in Weld County, Co …

"I was thinking about staying. I could have lasted at least a year. I have a lot of training in wilderness survival," he said, adding that he probably had enough beer to last the whole time.

As he sat outside a makeshift shelter at a high school, Shultz floated the idea of walking back into the funky mountain town.

"If we hike back, I would stay there and just live. I'd rather be at our own house than staying at some other people's houses," he said.

His wife, Meagan Harrington, gave him a wry smile. About 10 of their neighbors declined to evacuate, she said.

"They said they wouldn't force you, but it was strongly encouraged," she said.

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People stand at the edge of a highway washed out by flooding along the South Platte River in Weld Co …

Shultz teared up behind his sunglasses as he compared his situation to that of his neighbors.

"At least all of our stuff's there and will be there when we get back. The people right by the river, their houses were washed away. Other people thought their houses were going to be OK, and then they started to go. It's just really devastating."

Across the foothills, rescuers made progress against the floodwaters. But they were still unable to go up many narrow canyon roads that were either underwater or washed out.

Meanwhile, President Barack Obama signed a disaster declaration and ordered federal aid for Colorado. The White House said in a statement Saturday night that the action makes federal funding available to affected individuals in Boulder County. The government said that other counties could be added later.

On Saturday, the surge of water reached the plains east of the mountains, cutting off more communities and diverting some rescue operations.

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Eric Machmuller, front left, and Pat Machmuller, rear left, lead a boat down a residential street to …

Four people have been confirmed dead since the harrowing floods began Wednesday. And hundreds of others have not been heard from in the flood zone, which has grown to cover portions of an area nearly the size of Connecticut.

Some of those who are unaccounted for may be stranded or injured. Others might have gotten out but not yet contacted friends and relatives, officials said.

Police expected to find more bodies as the full scope of damage emerges.

A woman was missing and presumed dead after witnesses saw floodwaters from the Big Thompson River destroy her home in the Cedar Cove area, Larimer County sheriff's spokesman John Schulz said.

"I expect that we're going to continue to receive reports of confirmed missing and confirmed fatalities throughout the next several days," he said.

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A resident sits in her front door and looks at flood waters in Longmont, Colo., on Saturday, Sept. 1 …

Two fatalities were identified by the Boulder County coroner Saturday as Wesley Quinlan and Wiyanna Nelson, both 19.

Authorities believe the couple died when they were swept away after driving into floodwaters and then leaving their vehicle. Their cause of death is under investigation.

The military put more troops on the ground and helicopters in the air to aid in the search-and-rescue effort.

By Saturday night, 1,750 people and 300 pets had been evacuated from Boulder and Larimer County, National Guard Lt. James Goff said.

The airlifts will continue Sunday with helicopter crews expanding their searches east to include Longmont, Fort Collins and Weld County.

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A boat carrying residents back to their homes to gather pets and belongings goes past a muddy U.S. f …

It was not clear how many people were still stranded.

A helicopter taking Gov. John Hickenlooper on a tour of the flooded areas even got in the act, stopping twice to pick up six stranded people and their two pets. Terry Kishiyama's son flagged down a helicopter with his shirt after a three-day wait for rescue from a neighbor's house on higher ground.

"You could hear the choppers for miles and miles, but I didn't know if they were evacuating people. You see a chopper going down behind a ridge, and you have no clue," Kishiyama said.

In addition to his son's efforts, Kishiyama said his wife shouted at the chopper, "We have babies!"

More than 85 fifth-graders from Louisville were greeted by their parents and friends Saturday after they were rescued from an outdoor education center near Jamestown.

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Kyle McDonald, 20, dumps buckets of water from the basement of his home into the street in Longmont, …

Above Larimer County, rescue crews airlifted 475 people to safety and planned to resume helicopter searches on Sunday, weather permitting.

Rain was expected to start up again in the mountains and foothills, with between a half-inch and 2 inches forecast to fall overnight, according to the National Weather Service.

Crews also used inflatable boats to pick up families and pets from farmhouses on Saturday. Some evacuees on horseback had to be escorted to safe ground.

Near Greeley, 35 miles east of the foothills, broad swaths of farmland had become lakes, and the raging South Platte and Poudre rivers surrounded more homes.

In one Boulder neighborhood, residents turned back city crews and machinery that arrived to remove the makeshift berms and sand-filled trash bags protecting their homes. University of Colorado students helped homeowners improvise a way to divert the rising water from Gregory Creek.

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Krsitin McDonald, right, dries out family photos while her husband Stanley McDonald, left, wipes his …

"The residents know better than anybody else how the water flows through the neighborhood," said Colleen Scanlan Lyons.

In communities where floodwaters began receding, homeowners had a chance to assess damage.

In Laporte, Wendy Clark surveyed soggy carpets and furniture that got damaged by the Poudre River.

"This mud smells disgusting," she said. "I don't know how long that's going to be around."

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Kathy Bell, 58, walks through a stream running through a neighbor's yard to get possessions from her …

Associated Press writers P. Solomon Banda in Boulder and Mead Gruver in Laporte contributed to this report.