Category Archives: Syria

Turkey confirms sarin was used in Syrian chemical attack

The Guardian reports: Traces of sarin gas have been detected in blood and urine samples from victims wounded in the town of Khan Sheikhun in Syria, giving “concrete evidence” of its use in the attack, Turkey’s health minister has said.

Doctors and aid workers who had examined the wounded of last week’s massacre, which provoked the first US military strikes against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, said they exhibited symptoms of exposure to a nerve agent similar to sarin, as well as a second chemical that may have been chlorine.

But the tests in Turkey, where many of the victims were taken for treatment due to the lack of medical facilities inside Syria, offer the first insight into the actual toxins used in the attack that killed over 80 people and drew worldwide condemnation and a renewed focus on the brutal conduct of the war.

The Turkish health minister Recep Akdağ said isopropyl methylphosphonic acid, a chemical that sarin degrades into, was found in the blood and urine samples taken from the patients who arrived in Turkey. Some 30 victims were brought across the border following the attack last Tuesday, and a number of them have died.

Autopsies on victims in Turkey shortly after the attack, monitored by the World Health Organization, had concluded there was evidence of sarin exposure. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: Vladimir Putin has deepened his support of the Syrian regime, claiming its opponents planned false-flag chemical weapon attacks to justify further US missile strikes.

The Russian president’s predictions on Tuesday of an escalation in the Syrian war involving more use of chemical weapons came as US officials provided further details of what they insist was a sarin attack by Bashar al-Assad’s forces against civilians on 4 April, and accused Moscow of a cover-up and possible complicity.

The hardening of the Kremlin’s position, and its denial of Assad’s responsibility, accelerated a tailspin in US-Russian relations, just as the US secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, arrived in Moscow for direct talks.

Tillerson had hoped to underscore the US position with a unified message from the G7, which condemned the chemical attack at a summit in Italy on Tuesday. However, G7 foreign ministers were divided over possible next steps and refused to back a British call for fresh sanctions. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports on Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’s first news conference since taking over the Defense Department: A senior defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to describe sensitive information, said that chlorine has a different status than sarin under international law, but Mattis does not want to say what will happen if Assad continues to use it. The idea, the official said, is to give the regime pause before using any kind of chemical weapon.

During the news conference, Mattis said the United States will need to decide as a matter of policy how it will respond in the future to the use of any kind of chemical weapon, including chlorine, in Syria.

“There is a limit, I think, to what we can do,” Mattis said. “And when you look at what happened with this chemical attack, we knew that we could not stand passive on this.” [Continue reading…]

In a statement on Monday, Mattis claimed the U.S. missile strike resulted in the damage or destruction of “20 percent of Syria’s operational aircraft.”

No doubt Putin’s claims about false flag operations will gain easy traction in the Russia-friendly marginal media, but it’s worth remembering that sarin can’t be made in a kitchen sink (nor can it be easily dispersed on a battlefield), and the Assad regime possessed its chemical weapons production facilities through support from the Soviet Union.

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Spicer apologizes for saying Hitler didn’t use chemical weapons

Bloomberg reports: White House press secretary Sean Spicer apologized after a storm of criticism followed remarks in which he attempted to compare Syria’s Bashar al-Assad to Adolf Hitler by saying that even the Nazi leader didn’t “sink to using chemical weapons.”

“It was a mistake; I shouldn’t have done it,” Spicer said on CNN, acknowledging that host Wolf Blitzer’s characterization of his remarks as a “blunder” was accurate. “My goal now and then is to stay focused on Assad and I should have, and I’ll make sure to stay in my lane when I talk about that.”

During his briefing for reporters earlier in the day, Spicer was asked how the U.S. might persuade Russia to stop supporting Assad’s government. He responded, in part: “We didn’t use chemical weapons in World War Two. We had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.”

The statement overlooked Hitler’s systematic killing of Jews and others using hydrogen cyanide pesticide, known as Zyklon B, in gas chambers at concentration camps. More than 6 million Jews died during the Holocaust.

As his remarks ricocheted across social media — on the Jewish Passover holiday — President Donald Trump’s chief spokesman was given the chance to elaborate. He only deepened the controversy.

“I think when you come to sarin gas, there was no — he was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing,” Spicer said. When reporters interrupted to note the millions of deaths in concentration camps, where many of the victims were Germans, Spicer tried to draw a distinction between those cases and battlefield use of chemical weapons.

“There was not in the — he brought them into the Holocaust centers and I understand that,” he said.

After the briefing, Spicer emailed a statement seeking to clarify his remarks.

“In no way was I trying to lessen the horrendous nature of the Holocaust,” Spicer wrote. “I was trying to draw a distinction of the tactic of using airplanes to drop chemical weapons on population centers. Any attack on innocent people is reprehensible and inexcusable.”

In his CNN interview, Spicer did not directly answer when Blitzer asked if viewers “could assume” Trump had told him to publicly apologize.

“You can assume that I realized that I had made a mistake and I did not want to be a distraction to the president’s agenda,” Spicer said. “When you make a mistake, you own it.”

Other administration officials have drawn historic parallels as they denounced the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime. Defense Secretary James Mattis, speaking later in the afternoon, said that “even in World War II, chemical weapons were not used on the battlefield.”

But Spicer’s bungled phrasing prompted calls for his dismissal. [Continue reading…]

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Why would Assad use sarin in a war he’s winning? To terrify Syrians

Annia Ciezadlo writes: In the summer of 1925, rebels from the Syrian countryside mounted a guerrilla uprising against French colonial rule. The French retaliated by looting, burning and carrying out massacres in villages they suspected of supporting the rebels. That October, French authorities executed around 100 villagers outside Damascus. They displayed 16 of the mutilated corpses in the capital’s main public square; La Syrie, the government newspaper, called the row of bodies “a splendid hunting score.”

The French had no military reason to do this. Although they had underestimated the rebels at first, they were sure to defeat the vastly outgunned Syrian peasants in the end. The line of butchered bodies was there to send a message: This is the fate of rebels and those who support them.

Last week, warplanes dropped a chemical agent — most likely sarin gas, according to doctors who treated the victims — on a town in the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib called Khan Sheikhoun. As gruesome pictures emerged of men, women and children convulsing and foaming at the mouth before dying, a simple question came to dominate the discussion online. From the far right of Mike Cernovich and Ron Paul to the anti-imperialist left, the question was: Why would Assad gas his own people when he was already winning the war? The Syrian regime had already regained control of rebel-held east Aleppo and was in the midst of evacuating the country’s few remaining rebel-held enclaves. So why would Assad provoke international outrage with needless carnage, when he had much to lose and little concrete military gain?

“We still don’t know exactly what happened in Syria and who was responsible,” wrote the far-left writer and commentator Rania Khalek on Twitter, “but fact remains that Syrian govt gains nothing from a CW attack.” The far-right conservative commentator and talk-radio host Michael Savage put it more succinctly: “Now what would Assad have gained by doing that? Is he stupid?”

In the increasingly influential world of conspiracy websites like Infowars, this simple question — and the lack of definitive answers — has managed to sow doubt. As it spread online, the idea that Assad had nothing to gain from a chemical attack fed into a vortex of claims that the Khan Sheikhoun gas attack was a false flag, an elaborate hoax designed to justify a U.S. military intervention in Syria. President Trump’s missile strikes on April 6, and his administration’s abrupt about-face on the question of regime change, have only bolstered that theory.

What these American observers don’t grasp is that Assad doesn’t care about them: He plays less to the West than to his internal audience. The videos of children and first responders dying from sarin gas horrified people, but this is exactly what they were intended to do: They were meant to strike fear into rebels, and send the message that the war was over. [Continue reading…]

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White House warns of potential U.S. ‘red line’ over Syria barrel bomb attacks

The Guardian reports: The Trump administration has signalled much broader grounds for future military intervention in Syria, suggesting it might retaliate against the Assad regime for barrel bomb attacks.

On the eve of a critical visit to Moscow at a time of high US-Russian tensions over Syria, the US secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, appeared to go even further, saying his country would come to the defence of innocent civilians “anywhere in the world”.

The administration had initially stressed strictly limited objectives for a cruise missile strike last week on a Syrian air force base, saying it was intended to deter the repeat of a chemical attack on Tuesday against civilians and that the focus of US efforts in Syria remains combating the Islamic State (Isis).

On Monday, however, the White House spokesman, Sean Spicer, widened the criteria for retaliation. “When you watch babies and children being gassed, and suffer under barrel bombs, you are instantaneously moved to action,” he said. “I think this president’s made it very clear that if those actions were to continue, further action will definitely be considered by the United States.”

On Tuesday diplomats gathered in Italy for a second day of G7 talks dominated by the war in Syria, as officials in Washington, the UK and elsewhere floated the possibility of new sanctions on the Syrian and Russian military.

US intelligence believes Assad carried out last week’s attack with the chemical agent sarin, killing dozens of civilians including children. But Spicer made the first mention of the use of barrel bombs – crude munitions that can cause indiscriminate casualties.

Pressed on whether chemical warfare as opposed to conventional warfare constitutes a red line, he replied: “I think the president’s been very clear that there were a number of lines crossed last week … The answer is if you gas a baby, if you put a barrel bomb into innocent people, I think you will see a response from this president. That is unacceptable.”

The White House said later that Spicer was referring to barrel bombs carrying industrial chemicals like chlorine. But that would still represent a substantial expansion of the US rules of engagement in Syria. The regime is suspected of using chlorine gas in its attacks on dozens of occasions since 2013. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. defense chiefs say they want to deter more chemical attacks, not oust Assad

The Guardian reports: The US defense chiefs have said that Washington’s objectives in Syria are limited to deterring additional chemical weapons attacks by Bashar al-Assad.

After days of contradictory messages from the Trump administration, the US defense secretary, James Mattis, used his first Pentagon press conference on Tuesday to clarify that the US seeks no wider military involvement in a conflict he defined as extraordinarily complex.

Seated aside army Gen Joseph Votel, the US military commander for the Middle East, Mattis repeatedly brushed aside suggestions of ousting Assad, a diplomatic objective that secretary of state Rex Tillerson intends to raise in Moscow on the first visit by a senior US official since Donald Trump took office. He is due to meet his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, but it is not clear whether an expected session with Vladimir Putin would go ahead.

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Putin compared the US intervention in Syria to the ill-fated Iraq invasion of 2003. He claimed to know “from different sources” that the US had been duped into carrying out a missile strike by rebels intent on dragging Washington into the conflict. He predicted there would be more poison gas attacks to come, which he said would be false flag operations by rebels in order to justify more US missile strikes.

“Similar provocations – and I can’t call it anything other than that – are being prepared in other parts of Syria,” Putin said.

Russia has claimed that the deaths of more than 80 people by poison gas in the town of Khan Sheikhun on 4 April, were caused by a Syrian regime strike on a chemical weapons facility run by terrorists but has provided no evidence. The Guardian visited Khan Sheikhun after the attack and saw no evidence of any such facility having been bombed. [Continue reading…]

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Why Vladimir Putin may be in too deep in Syria to ditch Assad

Martin Chulov writes: Five years of political capital, over a million tonnes of weapons, tens of billions of dollars, Russia’s role as both dominant regional presence and rising global force – these are all at stake if Vladimir Putin abandons Syria’s leader.

This is the reckoning faced by the US secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, as he travels to Moscow to try to prise the Russian president away from his support of Bashar al-Assad in the aftermath of last week’s nerve agent attack on Khan Sheikhun.

Ahead of the first high-level summit between Russia and the US since the election of Donald Trump, hopes have been raised that the atrocity could be a catalyst for change in a country destroyed by war and failed by global politics.

Those hopes, however, are almost certain to be dashed. Throughout the conflict, and especially since the Kremlin doubled down on its support for Assad in September 2015, Russia has pursued a win-at-all-costs strategy, which has regularly defied the bounds of modern warfare and edged Assad’s regime towards a winning position on the battlefield. [Continue reading…]

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Why the Russians aren’t likely to break with Assad

Vali Nasr writes: By punishing Syria for its use of chemical weapons, President Donald Trump effectively broke with Barack Obama’s foreign policy toward the Middle East. In a bit of irony for a committed anti-interventionist, Trump enforced Obama’s red line in Syria against the use of chemical weapons, ending the U.S. prohibition on military strikes targeting the regime of Bashar al-Assad. This is not necessarily the start of a larger American war in Syria, but it could be the beginning of the end of the Syrian conflict.

For opponents of Assad who hope Washington will seek regime change in Damascus, news of the strikes on a Syrian airbase was welcome. The Trump administration may not escalate much further, but some expect it to push Russian President Vladimir Putin to break with Assad. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and Secretary of State of Rex Tillerson have, in turn, called Moscow either complicit in Assad’s chemical attack, as at least one U.S. official has alleged, or incompetent in fulfilling the promise of preventing it. Either way, Tillerson is expected to use his visit to Moscow this week to demand Russia break with Assad.

But the promise of a break is wishful thinking. The chemical attack and the retaliatory U.S. strike may have embarrassed and angered Russia—even if it was given heads up, as reporting suggests—but they’ve given Putin no reason to turn on Assad. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s strike against Syria doesn’t change the narrative

Anne Applebaum writes: I’m not sure if neophilia is a real disease or a literary invention, but having a love for novelty certainly describes a large part of the American and indeed the international press corps. My neophiliac colleagues and I love news, particularly news that changes the paradigm, news that lets you describe the world in a different way, news that means you can abandon the previous, stale conversation and turn with relief to something fresh.

President Trump’s decision to bomb an air base in Syria seems like exactly that kind of news. It changes the paradigm because it apparently contradicts everything Trump has ever said about Syria, either as president, as a candidate or even before that. For as long as he has been in public life, Trump has opposed humanitarian military intervention, which he has always interpreted in the most cynical fashion possible. On Oct. 9, 2012, he tweeted, for example:


On Aug. 29, 2013, he tweeted again:


And Sept. 5, 2013, he tweeted — in all caps:


Now it seems that Trump has had an abrupt change of heart, thanks, he says, to the (truly horrific) photographs of children dying of chemical poisoning in Idlib province. Relieved to see this American use of military power, pundits and journalists have filled the airwaves with a thousand different speculations. A BBC producer called me to ask whether I thought that this means “a new departure.” A CNN pundit and Post columnist declared that Trump, with this bombing raid, “became president of the United States.”

Really? Look again at what just happened: A president who has told us he believes military intervention happens when “poll numbers are in tailspin” has just intervened while his poll numbers are in a tailspin. [Continue reading…]

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On Trump’s Syria strategy, one voice is missing: Trump’s

The New York Times reports: In the days since President Trump ordered a cruise missile strike against Syria in retaliation for a chemical attack on civilians, his administration has spoken with multiple voices as it seeks to explain its evolving policy. But one voice has not been heard from: that of Mr. Trump himself.

As various officials have described it, the United States will intervene only when chemical weapons are used — or any time innocents are killed. It will push for the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria — or pursue that only after defeating the Islamic State. America’s national interest in Syria is to fight terrorism. Or to ease the humanitarian crisis there. Or to restore stability.

The latest mixed messages were sent on Monday in both Washington and Europe. Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson — during a stop in Italy on his way to Moscow for a potentially tense visit, given Russian anger at last week’s missile strike — outlined a dramatically interventionist approach. “We rededicate ourselves to holding to account any and all who commit crimes against the innocents anywhere in the world,” he said.

Hours later, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said at his daily briefing that Mr. Trump would act against Syria not just if it resorted to chemical weapons, like the sarin nerve agent reportedly used last week, but also when it used conventional munitions. “If you gas a baby, if you put a barrel bomb into innocent people, I think you will see a response from this president,” Mr. Spicer said.

For Mr. Trump, who came to office espousing an “America first” policy that stayed out of the affairs of other countries where the United States had no interest of its own, responding to barrel bombs in Syria or to “any and all” humanitarian abuses “anywhere” would be a far more sweeping standard for American leadership. If anything, it sounds more like the activist advisers around President Barack Obama, such as Samantha Power, his ambassador to the United Nations, who pushed for more intervention to protect civilians in various conflict zones, often to no avail.

Just as likely, analysts said, neither Mr. Tillerson nor Mr. Spicer really meant it or, possibly, fully understood the potentially far-reaching consequences of what they were saying. Unlike chemical weapons, barrel bombs — typically oil drums filled with explosives — are used with vicious regularity in the Syrian civil war. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, the government dropped 495 barrel bombs in March alone, and 12,958 in 2016.

By the end of the day Monday, fearing that a new “red line” had been drawn, the White House sought to unwind Mr. Spicer’s comment. “Nothing has changed in our posture,” officials said in a statement emailed to reporters. “The president retains the option to act in Syria against the Assad regime whenever it is in the national interest, as was determined following that government’s use of chemical weapons against its own citizens.” [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s action in Syria proves he is not in league with Putin, says his son Eric

The Telegraph reports: Donald Trump’s decision to launch a cruise missile attack on Syria proved he is not in league with Russia and will not be “pushed around” by Vladimir Putin, the US President’s son has told The Daily Telegraph.

Eric Trump said his father was not intimidated by President Putin’s talk of war, and there would be “no-one harder” than President Trump if they “cross us”.

He also confirmed that President Trump’s decision to bomb a Syrian airbase to punish President Bashar al-Assad for a nerve gas attack last week was influenced by the reaction of his sister Ivanka, who said she was “heartbroken and outraged” by the atrocity. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. official: Russia knew Syrian chemical attack was coming

The Associated Press reports: The United States has concluded Russia knew in advance of Syria’s chemical weapons attack last week, a senior U.S. official said Monday.

The official said a drone operated by Russians was flying over a hospital as victims of the attack were rushing to get treatment. Hours after the drone left, a Russian-made fighter jet bombed the hospital in what American officials believe was an attempt to cover up the usage of chemical weapons.

The senior official said the U.S. has no proof of Russian involvement in the actual chemical attack in northern Syria.

But the official said the presence of the surveillance drone over the hospital couldn’t have been a coincidence, and that Russia must have known the chemical weapons attack was coming and that victims were seeking treatment.

The official, who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly on intelligence matters and demanded anonymity, didn’t give precise timing for when the drone was in the area, where more than 80 people were killed. The official also didn’t provide details for the military and intelligence information that form the basis of what the Pentagon now believes.

Another U.S. official cautioned that no final American determination has been made that Russia knew ahead of time that chemical weapons would be used. That official wasn’t authorized to speak about internal administration deliberations and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The allegation of Russian foreknowledge is grave, even by the standards of the currently dismal U.S.-Russian relations.

Although Russia has steadfastly supported Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government, and they’ve coordinated military attacks together, Washington has never previously accused Moscow of complicity in any attack that involved the gassing of innocent civilians, including children. The former Cold War foes even worked together in 2013 to remove and destroy more than 1,300 tons of Syrian chemical weapons and agents.

Until Monday, U.S. officials had said they weren’t sure whether Russia or Syria operated the drone. The official said the U.S. is now convinced Russia controlled the drone. The official said it still isn’t clear who was flying the jet that bombed the hospital, because the Syrians also fly Russian-made aircraft. [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s Syria mistake is now Trump’s problem

Nader Hashemi writes: Two positive developments can be discerned from the Tomahawk missile attack on Syria.

First, Bashar Al-Assad will have to think twice about using chemical weapons again. Donald Trump has drawn his own red line in Syria, and there is now a price to be paid — assuming Trump keeps his word — for dropping sarin gas on civilians.

Secondly, we are now all talking about Syria. Before the missile strike, the general assumption was that Syria no longer mattered. The fall of Aleppo meant that Assad, and his Iranian/Russian allies, had won the war as a fait accompli.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer said last week that a new “political reality” had emerged in Syria “that we have to accept.” But do we?

The conflict in Syria is a global problem, back at the top of the international agenda, while another American president grapples with its complexity.

President Obama’s gross miscalculation in 2013 was to wager that the conflict could be contained within Syria’s borders. Reflecting a widely held realpolitik view at the time, political scientist John Mearsheimer argued that Syria did not affect the core strategic interests of the West and was of “little importance for American security.”

Looking back, we can see how misguided this assessment was. It was arguably the biggest foreign policy miscalculation of the Obama presidency. Not only has the Syrian conflict deeply destabilized the Middle East, but its ripple effects have dramatically re-shaped politics around the world, including the domestic politics of the United States. [Continue reading…]

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Russia and Assad regime escalate bombing — U.S. offers no response

Scott Lucas reports: Russia and the Assad regime have escalated already-intense bombing of northwest Syria, using incendiary munitions, two days after the US struck a regime airbase for the first time in the six-year conflict.

Russian and regime warplanes bombed at least 10 towns and villages across Idlib Province and northern Hama Province. Videos testified to the use of the incendiary material, such as thermite, to start large fires.

Khan Sheikhoun — the town in Idlib Province which was attacked by the regime with chemical weapons last Tuesday, killing more than 100 people and prompting Friday’s US response — was struck again. Contact was lost with residents in Saraqeb amid heavy attacks. Latamneh, bombed twice with chlorine in recent weeks, was targeted.

Sunday’s attacks continued the defiance of Washington after the US fired 59 Tomahawk missiles on the Shayrat airbase, from which the warplane carrying the chemical weapons — a hybrid of a nerve agent and chlorine — took off. On Saturday, the regime renewed strikes across Idlib Province, killing 19 people in the town of Urum al-Jouz alone and hitting Khan Sheikhoun. It also proclaimed loudly that flights from Shayrat had resumed.

A resident of Urum al-Jouz, noting that there are no military targets in the area, summarized, “There has been an undeniable escalation in this area and the Idlib countryside as a whole since the US airstrikes. If anything, they’ve made matters worse and have led Russia and the regime to increase their airstrikes.” [Continue reading…]

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Kremlin, angry at Syria missile strike, says Putin won’t meet Tillerson

Reuters reports: The Kremlin said on Monday that U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will not meet President Vladimir Putin when he visits Moscow on Wednesday, a move that could point to tensions over a U.S. missile attack on a Syrian air base last week.

John Kerry, Tillerson’s predecessor, often met Putin as well as the Russian foreign minister when he visited Moscow, and Putin granted several audiences to the Texan when he ran oil major Exxon Mobil before taking his current job.

Putin even personally awarded Tillerson a top Russian state award — the Order of Friendship — in 2013, and it was widely expected that the former oilman would meet Putin on what is his first trip to Russia as secretary of state.

But Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters on Monday that no such meeting was planned, suggesting Tillerson will follow strict diplomatic protocol and only meet his direct counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. [Continue reading…]

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McMaster: U.S. eager for regime change in Syria

Politico reports: White House national security adviser H.R. McMaster says that while the U.S. would push for regime change in Syria, “We’re not the ones who are going to effect that change.”

“What we’re saying is, other countries have to ask themselves some hard questions,” McMaster said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.” “Russia should ask themselves, ‘What are we doing here?’ Why are we supporting this murderous regime that is committing mass murder of its own population and using the most heinous weapons available?’”

McMaster characterized Thursday’s U.S. airstrike on a Syrian airfield as an opportunity for Russia to reevaluate its continued support for Syrian President Bashar Assad, adding that addressing both Assad’s actions and routing ISIS could be done simultaneously.

“I think, as you saw with the strike, that there has to be a degree of simultaneous activity as well as sequencing of the defeat of ISIS first,” McMaster said. “What you have in Syria is a very destructive cycle of violence, perpetuated by ISIS, obviously, but also by this regime and their Iranian and Russian sponsors.” [Continue reading…]

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Spicer adds ‘barrel bombs’ to the list of reasons the U.S. could again attack Syria

The Washington Post reports: The United States is prepared to again take action against the Syrian government if it continues to use chemical weapons and barrel bombs, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Monday. The use of barrel bombs — crude munitions often forbidden by international law — has become a near daily occurrence in war-torn Syria, so taking action each time one is dropped would mark a dramatic shift in strategy and would quickly escalate U.S. involvement in Syria.

Although Spicer lumped barrel bombs in the same category as chemical weapons on three separate occasions during a Monday briefing with reporters, he later insisted that his comments should not be interpreted as a change in U.S. policy.

“Nothing has changed in our posture,” Spicer said in a statement late Monday afternoon. “The president retains the option to act in Syria against the Assad regime whenever it is in the national interest, as was determined following that government’s use of chemical weapons against its own citizens. And as the president has repeatedly made clear, he will not be telegraphing his military responses.” [Continue reading…]

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Syria chemical attack pilot, General Mohammed Hasouri, said to have been killed by car bomb

The Times reports: The pilot who is believed to have dropped sarin gas on the Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun, killing at least 87 people, was General Mohammed Hasouri, an experienced commander who had carried out a previous chemical attack, The Times can reveal.

General Hasouri, a squadron commander from President Assad’s Alawite sect, was congratulated by General Ali Abdullah Ayoub, chief of general staff of the Syrian army, for “destroying al-Qaeda’s weapons facilities in Khan Sheikhoun” in the attack last Tuesday. A picture of the two was tweeted by Fares Shehabi, the MP for Aleppo and a high-profile member of Assad’s regime.

Syria and Russia insist that the deaths in Khan Sheikhoun from sarin gas exposure were caused by a conventional bomb hitting a rebel warehouse containing chemical weapons. That has been debunked by experts who say that any sarin stocks would be destroyed rather than released if such a strike took place. Witnesses at the site have noted that the crater from the missile is in the middle of a road, and that a warehouse shows no signs of having been used to store chemical weapons.

In his tweet Mr Shehabi names the pilot as General Haytham Hasouri, but Ahmad Rahal, a former Syrian air force brigadier, told The Times it was likely that he had been given a false first name in an attempt to conceal his identity.

He confirmed that the man in the picture was Mohammed Hasouri, the chief of staff of air force brigade 50. He is an Alawite, part of the Shia Muslim sect whose members hold most of the highest ranks in Assad’s regime.

His hometown, Talkalakh, is close to the Lebanese border where there was fierce fighting between rebels and the regime at the start of the conflict.

Observers who monitor the communications of the regime’s air force to warn people about bombings, confirmed to The Times that the Khan Sheikhoun attack was carried out by a pilot called Mohammed Hasouri. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: Although officials acknowledged that they have seen no evidence directly linking Russia to the attacks, national security adviser H.R. McMaster said that Russia should be pressed to answer what it knew ahead of the chemical attack since it has positioned warplanes and air defense systems with associated troops in Syria since 2015.

“I think what we should do is ask Russia, how could it be, if you have advisers at that airfield, that you didn’t know that the Syrian air force was preparing and executing a mass murder attack with chemical weapons?” McMaster said on Fox News. [Continue reading…]

As a high-ranking Syrian air force officer, Hasouri would surely be in close communication with the Russians present at his airfield. It would appear that the risk he might reveal the content of those communications has now been eliminated.

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Tillerson, on eve of Russia trip, takes hard line on Syria

The New York Times reports: Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson is taking a hard line against Russia on the eve of his first diplomatic trip to Moscow, calling the country “incompetent” for allowing Syria to hold on to chemical weapons and accusing Russia of trying to influence elections in Europe using the same methods it employed in the United States.

Mr. Tillerson’s comments, made in interviews aired on Sunday, were far more critical of the Russian government than any public statements by President Trump, who has been an increasingly lonely voice for better ties with Russia. They seemed to reflect Mr. Tillerson’s expectation, which he has expressed privately to aides and members of Congress, that the American relationship with Russia is already reverting to the norm: one of friction, distrust and mutual efforts to undermine each other’s reach.

“This was inevitable,” said Philip H. Gordon, a former Middle East coordinator at the National Security Council who is now at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Trump’s early let’s-be-friends initiative was incompatible with our interests, and you knew it would end with tears.” The Russians’ behavior has not changed, Mr. Gordon added, and they “are using every means they can — cyber, economic arrangements, intimidation — to reinsert themselves around the Middle East and Europe.”

Mr. Tillerson made it clear he agreed with that view, sweeping past Mr. Trump’s repeated insistence, despite the conclusion of American intelligence agencies, that there was no evidence of Russian interference in last year’s election. The meddling “undermines any hope of improving relations,” Mr. Tillerson said on ABC’s “This Week,” “not just with the United States, but it’s pretty evident that they’re taking similar tactics into electoral processes throughout Europe.” [Continue reading…]

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