ASSAD SHOWS NO MERCY
Bombs town hit in gas attack again
SYRIA, ALREADY the focus of increasingly tense bickering between the United States and Russia, was rattled again Saturday by a rash of lethal explosions.
Two Syrian opposition-held towns, including the one where 87 people died in a chemical weapons attack, were hit by deadly air strikes.
The new bombing of Khan Sheikhoun came four days after the mass killing that provoked Thursday’s retaliatory attack by the United States on a Syrian air base. One woman was killed and at least three other people were wounded in the attack, including her son. That attack happened in a residential neighborhood, CNN reported.
Another air strike came in the northwest Syria town of Urom al-Joz, where 18 people were slain — including five children and two women, according to opposition activists.
Bombs fell from the sky in several other Syrian provinces including Daraa and Idlib, killing an untold number of civilians.
Though the source of the air strikes remained uncertain, Syrian fighter jets resumed operations at the air base pounded two days earlier by 59 U.S. Tomahawk missiles.
The planes were able to take off because the strikes did not take out the airstrips as President Trump explained in a tweet Saturday.
“The reason you don’t generally hit runways is that they are easy and inexpensive to quickly fix (fill in and top)!” Trump wrote.
The U.S. charged the planes carrying the chemical weapons flew out of the Shayrat air base, where seven people were killed by the American missiles.
“Congratulations to our great military men and women for representing the United States, and the world, so well in the Syria attack,” President Trump wrote in another tweet.
Trump, in a Saturday letter to Congress, said his decision to strike out at Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime was done “in the vital national security and foreign policy interests of the United States.”
He also echoed the threat of U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, who warned Russian diplomats Friday that the U.S. was ready to strike again if needed.
Trump’s note said the United States would “take additional ac-
tion, as necessary and appropriate.”
The President spent Saturday afternoon hitting the links at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu urged the United States to intervene further against the Assad regime and help end the six-year civil war.
“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.
Both the Assad regime and the Russians denied any use of poisonous gas in the Tuesday attack. Officials in Iran, another Assad ally, urged a fact-finding mission to determine exactly what happened.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani called for an impartial committee that “must not be headed by Americans. Neutral countries should come and assess to make it clear where the chemical weapons came from.”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Saturday that the evidence proves the deadly gas came directly from Assad.
“We had the radar information and the forensic reports,” he said. “Some say Syria does not have chemical weapons. Of course it does. It’s clear what planes dropped it.”
A Saturday air strike by the U.S.-led coalition killed at least 21 people, including a woman and her six kids on a boat in the Euphrates River, according to activists.
The doomed family was fleeing the city of Raqqa, the self-proclaimed “capital” of ISIS fighters and the target of an offensive by Kurdish-led Syrian forces.
A bomb also killed one woman and wounded 25 others in the city of Homs, officials said. No group claimed responsibility for that blast.