Trump orders strike on Syria
Russia accuses west of faking gas attack that killed 40 people
DAMASCUS, Syria — Explosions rocked Syria’s capital and filled the sky with smoke early Saturday after U.S. President Donald Trump announced airstrikes in retaliation for the country’s alleged use of chemical weapons.
Syrian air defences responded to the joint strikes by the United States, France and Britain.
Associated Press reporters saw smoke rising from east Damascus and the lit-up sky turning orange for the blasts. A huge fire could be seen from a distance to the east.
Syrian TV said the attacks targeted a scientific research centre and an army depot near Homs.
The Syrian government has denied any use of banned weapons.
BEIRUT — The suspected chemical weapons attack on Douma was a brutal finale for a town that had haunted Syrian President Bashar Assad for seven years from right on his doorstep.
The leafy suburb on Damascus’ outskirts was the bastion of one of the toughest, most disciplined Islamist factions in Syria’s rebellion, raining mortars on Assad’s seat of power and holding out for years under devastating siege.
Now destroyed and defeated, it will be the scene of an international fact-finding mission that arrives Saturday to try to determine what happened there.
Russia and the United States have traded threats of military strikes and counterstrikes since the April 7 attack, which first responders and activists say killed more than 40 people and blamed on Assad’s forces. Syria has denied any such attack even took place.
The Russian Defence Ministry claimed Friday the attack was fake and accused Britain of staging it, a bold charge vehemently denied by Britain as “a blatant lie.”
The suspected chemical strike came after weeks of an intense air campaign that killed an estimated 1,600 people and tore the rebel-held Damascus suburbs of eastern Ghouta apart, levelling towns in an enclave that once housed 400,000 people, according to U.N. estimates.
A resident of Douma, an economist who fled the town amid threats to his life in 2015 and now lives in exile, said eight of his neighbours — two women and their six children — were found dead three days after the suspected chemical attack and were believed to have suffocated in their underground shelter from the poisonous gas. He said two of his aunts were still missing.
“There were plenty of bloody attacks before the use of chemical weapons and no one moved,” he said. “Only now and after seven years of destruction, the U.S. and the world remembered it was time to punish Assad?”
Hours after the attack, the Army of Islam rebel group, which had controlled Douma since 2012, agreed to surrender and evacuate its fighters to rebel-held northern Syria. The militants also gave up their prisoners, a key demand of the Syrian government, and handed over their heavy weapons and maps of tunnels built over the years to navigate the sprawling neighbourhood. The last batch of rebel fighters left Douma on Friday, heading to Jarablus, a town in northern Syria controlled by Turkey-backed rebels and with a Turkish military presence.
A member of the Army of Islam, who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Samer, said the alleged chemical gas attack was the final blow that settled the group’s fate.
Fearing an internal uprising and divisions within the group, Army of Islam leaders opted to leave Douma, he said.
“To be honest, it was not the death of 40 or 50 that would have made (the rebels) give up on Douma. Many more died earlier,” Abu Samer said. “The chemical attack wasn’t the cruelest. But it was the terror and panic that hit the people that exerted the pressure on the group to leave.”
TRUMP MULLING STRIKE WASHINGTON — Russia and Britain exchanged sharp accusations Friday over the suspected poison gas attack in Syria, and the U.S. Navy was moving an additional Tomahawk missile-armed ship within striking range as President Donald Trump and his national security aides mulled the scope and timing of an expected military assault.
Trump’s U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, said the president had not yet made a final decision, two days after he tweeted that Russia should “get ready” because a missile attack “will be coming” at Moscow’s chief Middle East ally. The presence of Russian troops and air defences in Syria were among numerous complications weighing on Trump, who must also consider the dangers to roughly 2,000 American troops in the country if Russia were to retaliate for U.S. strikes.
Britain and France said they, too, believe the Syrian government must be penalized.