Tragedy on top of tragedy as war rages on Euphrates River, activists said. Near the city of Homs, a bomb exploded aboard a bus, killing a woman, according to state TV. Activists and state media said a separate airstrike by the US-led coalition on the no
Besieged towns bombed again amid new strikes
Warplanes struck the Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun early Saturday, battering residents still reeling from the Bashar al-Assad regime’s deadly gas attack there.
The fresh airstrike — which came amid new violence in the Syrian cities of Daraa, Raqqa and Homs — killed one woman and wounded her son and at least two others, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported.
The toll in the latest Khan Sheikhoun attack was low — likely because the area had already been reduced to a virtual ghost town by Tuesday’s sarin-gas attack, which killed 87 people, including 31 children and 20 women, according to the Observatory.
President Trump, outraged by what he decried as the deaths of “beautiful babies,” had responded to the chemical attack by bombing Syria’s Shayrat military airfield, from which he said Assad dispatched the planes that carried the toxic payloads.
Photographs from the town showed a pair of green slippers abandoned next to a blood-splattered doorway, The Washington Post reported.
Survivors had hoped the US airstrikes, which landed early Friday and were said to have destroyed 20 Syrian war jets, would bring some respite.
But Saturday’s bombings — not yet officially ascribed to either the Syrian military or its Russian backers — rained new damage over the town’s freshly dug graves.
“The American strikes did nothing for us,” one resident, Majed Khattab, told The Washington Post by phone. “They can still commit massacres at any time. No one here can sleep properly. People are really afraid.”
And the distraught father who became the face of the chemical attack — after he was photographed clutching the poisoned bodies of his twin 9-month-old babies — told ABC News that he’s grateful to Trump, and hopes for more US airstrikes against Assad.
“I didn’t expect the strikes to stop,” Abdel Hameed al-Yousef said. “I was surprised. Why did President Trump stop the strikes? Why one airport, one base?”
Meanwhile, a Russian frigate armed with cruise missiles joined the Russian fleet in the Mediterranean, its progress closely followed amid heightened tensions.
The ship was returning from a visit to the Turkish navy off Novorossiysk in western Russia.
Russia, which has decried the US strike against its ally, Syria, did not indicate that the frigate had been moved in retaliation.
But NATO called the gathering of ships one of the largest deployments of Russian naval power in decades.
And retired US Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling told CNN that the frigate’s deployment appears to be a show of force.
“I think the Russians were caught off guard” by the US airstrikes, Hertling said.
Elsewhere in Syria, it was war as usual for the US-led and Russian-Syrian coalitions.
Despite extensive damage to its infrastructure, flights resumed at the Shayrat airfield.
In the southern Syrian city of Daraa, Syrian army units fired truck-launched missiles at alNusra Front terror installations Saturday morning.
In ISIS’s self-styled capital of Raqqa, US-led airstrikes killed at least 21 people, including a woman and her six children who were fleeing on a boat across the