THE WORLD HOLDS ITS BREATH
AFTER THIS WEEK’S GAS ATTACK BY THE ASSAD REGIME AND THE BITTER POLITICAL FALLOUT OF US PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’S RETALIATORY AIR STRIKES, SYRIA STANDS MORE ON A KNIFE EDGE THAN EVER BEFORE. FOREIGN EDITOR DAVID PRATT REPORTS
IT WAS business as usual at al-Shayrat airfield on Friday. Less than 24 hours after the United States fired a salvo of 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles into the base, Syrian fighter aircraft were again using the installation to launch sorties against president Bashar al-Assad’s regime opponents.
Even as US officials went public to declare Thursday’s missile strike a success, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the war in the country, was reporting that warplanes were seen taking off from al-Shayrat.
One unconfirmed video clip even appeared online showing a Sukhoi Su-22 lifting off the runway. Like so many episodes in the Syrian war, independent corroboration of the report was difficult to verify.
But for now at least there appears sufficient evidence to suggest al-Shayrat remains functioning and that the Damascus regime remains defiant.
That al-Assad’s regime has so quickly returned to using the airbase sends a clear signal to Washington that it will not be cowed. It underlines, too, the clear limitations of the US missile strikes that were meant to bring al-Assad to heel.
America’s response came after Syrian warplanes last Tuesday delivered a chemical weapons strike on the northwestern town of Khan Sheikhoun, where at least 84 people died and more than 500 were injured.
For US President Donald Trump it marked a complete U-turn on his Syrian policy whereby he has consistently stressed that the US will not become further involved in the conflict.
“It is in the vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons,” said Trump in announcing the strike.
Some political observers say Trump was in great part motivated to order the attack by news reports he saw on television depicting the limp bodies of civilian victims and children choking while rescuers tried to wash off the poison gas.
Others suggest Trump’s decision to act had perhaps more to do with his numerous domestic political problems. What better way to deflect heat from the ongoing investigation into Russian influence in the 2016 US presidential election, some asked.
Other critics suggested that by taking direct action on Syrian chemical weapons, Trump had found a way to help exorcise the ever-present spectre of the Obama presidency, which itself decided not to act militarily when presented with similar evidence of chemical weapons use.
Critics of Trump, too, were quick to make the point that if he cared so much about Syrian children why then is he also banning those fleeing the war from entering the US?
“It leaves the United States in the morally awkward position of permitting the killing of Syrian children, but only seeming to object to the weapons they are killed with – hardly a winning argument on the Arab street,” observed Kori Schake, a fellow of the Hoover Institution, writing in the respected online magazine Foreign Policy.
Whatever the Trump administration’s motives, the message to al-Assad could not have been clearer. Or could it?
The Russians, although certainly not pleased with the attack, were clearly consulted, and effort was taken to skirt the locations of their forces on the ground in Syria. Russia maintains a presence at the airbase, which it has also used as a staging post for helicopter gunship attacks.
The Russians in turn, according to some reports, then informed the Syrian authorities that the attack was imminent, allowing some Syrian military personnel to evacuate before the Tomahawks rained down on al-Shayrat.
This raises the claim that the attack was largely symbolic. If indeed that is the case, then it means hopes expressed by the Syrian opposition that the strikes are the first of many are unlikely to be fulfilled.
WHERE there is general agreement over the dramatic events of last week is that something had to be done to warn the Syrian regime over its use of chemical weapons.
Tuesday’s attack on Khan Sheikhoun was no isolated incident. It was back in August, 2012, that then US president Barack Obama declared the use of chemical weapons constituted a “red line” that the al-Assad regime should not cross. Almost a year later, however, that line was indeed crossed when the Syrian government launched rockets filled with sarin nerve agent into the Damascus suburb of Ghouta in August 2013, killing more than 1,400 men, women and children.
Rather than take military action, however, Obama agreed to a Russian deal to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons programme.
Under the agreement, Syria gave a manifest of its chemical weapons and facilities to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the global chemicals watchdog, which moved quickly to decommission the declared facilities and weapons. By the end of 2014, all of Syria’s declared chemical weapons were destroyed, along with 24 of Syria’s declared production facilities. The other three have not yet been destroyed due to instability, according to inspector reports.
Some officials, however, remained scep- tical. In February 2016, James R Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, testified to the US Senate Armed Services Committee that Syria had not declared its entire chemical weapons programme to inspectors. International monitors, too, continued to receive reports of smaller chemical attacks throughout 2016.
Indeed, since 2014, rebel-held sections of Idlib, Hama, Aleppo and elsewhere have been subjected to at least 120 chemical attacks, mostly by helicopters armed with barrel bombs filled with the toxic chemical chlorine.
Terrible as these attacks were, they rarely caused mass fatalities. The latest attack on Khan Sheikhoun was significant not only for the high number of deaths but also for its use of a far deadlier type of chemical weapon. According to US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Washington has “very high confidence” that sarin was used in the attack.
Sarin gas is nothing new and Syria’s development of it has most likely at some stage been aided indirectly by chemical exports made by a number of countries, including the UK.
In a statement from 2014, the then British foreign secretary William Hague confirmed that decades earlier the UK had sold hundreds of tonnes of the chemical constituents that could be used for the production of sarin and VX gas to the al-Assad regime.
“A review of our own files suggests that there were a number of exports of chemicals to Syria by UK companies between 1983 and 1986 which were likely to have been diverted for use in the Syrian programme,”
confirmed Hague to the House of Commons. Among the exports were several hundred tonnes of the chemical dimethyl phosphite (DMP) in 1983 and a further export of several hundred tonnes in 1985. There were also several hundred tonnes of trimethyl phosphite (TMP) in 1986 and a smaller quantity of hydrogen fluoride (HF) in 1986 through a third country.
All these chemicals, Hague stressed, have legitimate uses in the likes of plastics and pharmaceuticals manufacture but as the former foreign secretary himself noted: “They can also be used in the production of sarin, while DMP and TMP can also be used for the production of the nerve agent VX.”
If the chemical agent used in last week’s attack was indeed sarin, it would either confirm suspicions that the Syrian regime did not destroy its entire chemical weapons stockpile as promised when it joined the Chemical Weapons Convention ( CWC) in 2013, or that it has resumed production of these weapons in violation of the treaty.
Should either of those scenarios be the case, it now begs the question as to whether the al-Assad regime will heed the latest US warning or continue to flagrantly ignore it.
Should it choose the latter, Washington will be faced with little alternative but to respond again, perhaps even more heavily. This raises a number of pressing questions for Trump, both at a regional level and on the international diplomatic stage.
Looming over the broadly welcomed US strikes on Friday was the apparent lack of any overarching strategy to lever al-Assad out of power or facilitate a political solution to the six-year-old Syrian civil war.
Key allies, most of the State Department and Congress were all kept in the dark regarding the missile launch, which Trump announced to Chinese president Xi Jinping as the two dined on Thursday at Trump’s Florida resort. At home, in the near future, Trump may pay a political price for that initial reticence.
On a wider level, the risks the US faces as a result of its action and any further military strikes are numerous. The most obvious of these is the reaction from al-Assad himself and his backers and allies, including Iran and the Lebanese group Hezbollah.
THIS may not be as blatant as direct attacks on the US military in the region, but it may involve proxies hitting US soft targets nearby.
Syrian military and intelligence forces may target Americans operating in Syria and Iraq and the Iranian Quds forces may do the same.
Washington, meanwhile, will be determined to ensure that its ongoing battles against the jihadists of the Islamic State (IS) group in key cities like Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq are not undermined.
Iran, a major ally of al-Assad, could be a key player in bringing pressure to bear on the US in the region. Its navy, for example, might perhaps provoke US forces operating in the Persian Gulf or threaten to break out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and restart its nuclear programme.
Then, of course, there is the thorny issue of Russia. Arguably the main point of Russia’s intervention in Syria was to embolden Moscow on the world stage after the crippling effects of sanctions on the country.
Russian president Vladimir Putin must now find an appropriate response to having an airbase – where they have stationed assets – flattened in a US strike.
It may not be military action, and may not be in Syria, but the Russian leader has shown he is a master of turning a completely different screw on his opponent. Think about Libya, or Ukraine.
Few issues irk Moscow more than Western infringement into what Moscow considers its sphere of influence, and Russian state media wasted no time airing its anger and disdain over the US missile strikes.
“Trump needed this to reduce the intensity of criticism he receives from Congress and the media, and to maintain his ratings,” military expert Igor Korotchenko said in the official Russian Parliament newspaper. “He wanted to show that he’s tougher and more decisive than Obama.”
This weekend Moscow was still taking its own tough line. “We strongly condemn the illegitimate actions by the US. The consequences of this for regional and international stability could be extremely serious,” Russia’s deputy UN envoy, Vladimir Safronkov, told a meeting of the UN Security Council.
Russia’s subsequent decision to suspend use of the “deconfliction” communication hotline between its own air force and that of the US-led coalition intended to prevent mid-air incidents in the already congested airspace over Syria could also substantial- ly increase the possibility of some kind of clash between them.
Moscow also promised that it would quickly strengthen the Syrian air defence system, another potential risk to coalition airplanes. The quiet back-channel discussions between Moscow and Washington rather than the public statements and gestures, however, will be the real measure of preventing a wider escalation.
It was no doubt with this in mind that US military planners took such care to ensure that the missile raids on al-Shayrat airfield did not kill Russian military forces, for fear of closing down this negotiating channel.
But perhaps the greatest risk of all to have emerged out of the US attack last week is, as analyst Kori Schake says, the “ease and speed” with which the US commander-in-chief Trump did a complete U-turn on his policy position over Syria.
“Al-Qaeda’s success on 9/11 was not only the murder of 2,996 people in a shocking atrocity, but the subsequent redirection of US national security interests,” explains Schake.
“Trump has now allowed his national security priorities to be similarly hijacked, which could incentivise other adversaries to try to provoke similar redirections.”
If, indeed, Trump’s motive to respond to the chemical attack was an emotional one based on what he saw in news reports, then it can only be hoped he has a corresponding thought-out strategy with which to follow through in Syria. The cauldron of conflict that is the Middle East right now is no place for a US president to be without it.