Bombs fall anew after US airstrike
BEIRUT — Residents of the Syrian town devastated earlier this week by a chemical-weapons attack said warplanes returned to bomb them Saturday, despite a U.S. missile barrage and warnings of possible further response.
At least 87 people in the northwestern town of Khan Sheikhoun were killed Tuesday in the chemical attack that left hundreds choking, convulsing and foaming at the mouth. Eyewitnesses
and a monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said the fresh attacks on the area — now a virtual ghost town — had killed one woman and wounded several others on Saturday.
Photographs from the site showed a pair of green slippers abandoned in 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, U.S. President Donald Trump ordered a strike of 60 Tomahawk missiles on a Syrian airfield housing a jet fleet responsible for extensive bombing across northern Syria.
The missile barrage is the first direct military action that the United States has taken against Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government in the six-year conflict. Although Trump warned of 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 in Assad’s calculations, they appeared to be symbolic. 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 also were reports of Syrian government and Russian airstrikes across the provinces of Damascus, Aleppo, Idlib and Daraa, all killing civilians. There were no reports, however, of further use of chemical weapons.
“The American strikes did nothing for us. They can still commit massacres at any time,” 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.
A longtime backer of Syria’s armed opposition, Turkey is now overseeing a stuttering peace process in the Kazakh capital of Astana that it hopes will hasten an end to the war.
Cavusoglu said the best outcome would be a peace agreement that leads to a transitional government accepted
by all Syrians, followed by elections in which all Syrians, including those living abroad, could vote for new leadership. For that to happen, he said, “this oppressive Assad needs to go.”
Elsewhere in the region, leading Iraqi Shiite cleric and militia leader Muqtada al-Sadr called on Assad to step down and “save Syria before it’s too late.”
“President Bashar alAssad 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, Sergey Lavrov, in what would have been the first such meeting
since 2012. But Johnson said in a statement that “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 the 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, rallied around him this past week.
Russia condemned the American missile strike and suspended an agreement that would minimize the risk of inflight 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 factfinding 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.