Despite U.S. missile
barrage, Syria
continues airstrikes
against rebels
southern Syrian city of Daraa. (Mohamad Abazeed/AFP/Getty Images)
BEIRUT — Residents of the Syrian town devastated by a chemical
weapons attack earlier this week said warplanes had returned to
bomb them Saturday, despite a U.S. missile barrage and warnings
of possible further response.
At least 86 people in the northwestern town of Khan Sheikhoun were
killed Tuesday in a chemical attack that left hundreds choking, fitting
or foaming at the mouth. Eyewitnesses and a monitoring group, the
Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said Saturday that fresh attacks
on the area — now a virtual ghost town — had killed one woman and
wounded several others.
Photographs from the site showed a pair of green slippers, abandoned
by a blood-spattered doorway.
Residents cowered in bedrooms and basements throughout Saturday,
underscoring the apparently unchanged threat they faced from the
Syrian government’s arsenal of rockets, barrel bombs and other
weapons that have resulted in a majority of the conflict’s half-million dead.
In retaliation for Tuesday’s chemical assault, President Trump ordered
missile strikes on a Syrian airfield housing a jet fleet responsible for
extensive bombing across northern Syria.
What prompted the U.S. to act now, six years after the start of the civil war? The
Washington Post’s Amanda Erickson explains President Trump's decision to strike
Syria. (Amanda Erickson, Jason Aldag/The Washington Post)
The missile barrage is the first direct military action the United States
has taken against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government in the
six-year-long conflict. Although Trump warned of possible further
intervention, the Pentagon has said no other strikes against government
targets are in current plans.
Although American officials predicted that the strikes would result in
a major shift of Assad’s calculus, they appeared to be symbolic in practice.
Within 24 hours of the attack, monitoring groups reported that jets
were taking off from the bombed Shayrat air base once again, this
time to bomb Islamic State positions.
There were also reports of Syrian government and Russian airstrikes
across the provinces of Damascus, Aleppo, Idlib and Daraa, all killing
civilians. However, there were no reports of further use of chemical
weapons.
“The American strikes did nothing for us. They can still commit
massacres at anytime,” said Majed Khattab, speaking by phone from
Khan Sheikhoun. “No one here can sleep properly, people are really
afraid.”
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu described Trump’s decision
to retaliate as welcome, but not enough.
“If this intervention is limited only to an air base, if it does not continue
and if we don’t remove the regime from heading Syria, then this would
remain a cosmetic intervention,” he said.
The Washington Post's Louisa Loveluck reports on the regional reaction to President
Trump's cruise missile strike against a Syrian airfield in response to a chemical attack
that killed dozens of civilians. (Louisa Loveluck, Jason Aldag/The Washington Post)
A longtime backer of Syria’s armed opposition, Turkey is now overseeing
a stuttering peace process in the Kazakh capital, Astana, that it hopes
will hasten an end to the war.
Elsewhere in the region, a leading Iraqi Shiite cleric and militia leader,
Moqtada al-Sadr, called on Assad to step down and “save Syria before
it’s too late.”
“President Bashar al-Assad should resign and leave power for the love
of Syria, allowing the dear people of Syria to avoid war and the scourge
of terrorism,” he said.
Although some of Iraq’s Shiite militias that are more directly linked to
Iran have fought in support of Assad in Syria, Sadr’s Peace Brigades
have not, and the cleric promotes himself as a nationalist.
In his statement he also criticized U.S. and Russian intervention in the
country. “I call for a military retreat from Syria by everyone,” he
said. “They are the only ones who have the right to decide their fate.”
In a sign of the continuing diplomatic fallout from the chemical attack
and the U.S. response, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson
announced Saturday that he had canceled a planned visit to Moscow.
Johnson was to fly to Moscow on Monday to meet his Russian
counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, in what would have been the first such
meeting since 2012. But Johnson said in a statement tha
“developments in Syria have changed the situation fundamentally.”
“We deplore Russia’s continued defense of the Assad regime even after the chemical weapons attack on innocent civilians,” Johnson said.
Britain has been supportive of this week’s U.S. airstrikes against a
Syrian air base but has said it has no plans to join the United States
in any future attacks on Syrian government targets.
Meanwhile, Russia and Iran, Assad’s most influential supporters,
have rallied around him this week.
Russia condemned the U.S. missile strike and suspended an agreement
that would minimize the risk of in-flight incidents between Russian
and U.S. military aircraft over Syria.
And on Saturday, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, in a statement
carried by state television, called for the formation of an international
fact-finding committee that “must not be headed by Americans.”
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, a global
watchdog, said Thursday that it had initiated contact with the Syrian
government, and that it was investigating the attack on Khan Sheikhoun.
Zakaria reported from Gaziantep, Turkey. Griff Witte in London and
Loveday Morris in Beirut contributed to this report.
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