Category Archives: Syria

Assad used nerve gas because he’s desperate. Expect worse to come

The Daily Beast reports: Not long after U.S. cruise missiles tore into the Syrian air base that apparently served as the launch point for a chemical-weapons attack, the Syrian army’s chief of staff arrived to inspect the damage and commend the pilots.

They were the same pilots who flew their warplanes to the town of Khan Sheikhoun, where more than 100 civilians died.

Embracing the base pilots, presumably including those responsible for the chemical attack, Gen. Ali Abdullah Ayyoub praised the “high morale and fighting spirit” of the officers and soldiers at the Sharyat base. They in turn pledged to continue “rooting out terrorism wherever it exists in the homeland,” the official SANA news agency reported in a video.

In actual fact, Syrian forces probably carried out the gas attack out of desperation, according to U.S. military officials and Syrian rebel officials. And morale among regime forces may have hit a new low. [Continue reading…]

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Trump officials tell Russia to drop its support for Syria’s Assad

The Washington Post reports: Officials in the Trump administration on Sunday demanded that Russia stop supporting the Syrian government or face a further deterioration in its relations with the United States.

Signaling the focus of talks Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will have in Moscow later this week, officials said that Russia, in propping up Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, bears at least partial responsibility for Wednesday’s poison gas attack on villagers in Idlib province.

“I hope Russia is thinking carefully about its continued alliance with Bashar al-Assad, because every time one of these horrific attacks occurs, it draws Russia closer into some level of responsibility,” Tillerson said on ABC’s This Week.

Although officials acknowledged that they have seen no evidence directly linking Russia to the attacks, the top national security adviser, Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, said Russia should be pressed to answer what it knew ahead of the chemical attack since it has placed warplanes and air defense systems with associated troops in Syria since 2015. [Continue reading…]

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Chemical attacks underline the failure of U.S. policy on Syria under Obama

The New York Times reports: When it came time to make his case for the judgment of history, President Barack Obama had a ready rebuttal to one of the most cutting critiques of his time in office.

Although friends and foes alike faulted him for not following through on his threat to retaliate when Syria gassed its own people in 2013, Mr. Obama would counter that he had actually achieved a better result through an agreement with President Bashar al-Assad to surrender all of his chemical weapons.

After last week, even former Obama aides assume that he will have to rethink that passage in his memoir. More than 80 civilians were killed in what Western analysts called a sarin attack by Syrian forces — a chilling demonstration that the agreement did not succeed. In recent days, former aides have lamented what they considered one of the worst moments of the Obama presidency and privately conceded that his legacy would suffer.

“If the Syrian government carried out the attack and the agent was sarin, then clearly the 2013 agreement didn’t succeed in its objective of eliminating Bashar’s C.W.,” or chemical weapons, said Robert Einhorn, who was the State Department special adviser for nonproliferation and arms control under Mr. Obama before the agreement. “Either he didn’t declare all his C.W. and kept some hidden in reserve, or he illegally produced some sarin after his stock was eliminated — most likely the former.”

Other former advisers to Mr. Obama questioned the wisdom of negotiating with Mr. Assad and said last week’s attack illustrated the flaws in the agreement, which was brokered by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as a way to prevent the United States from using force.

“For me, this tragedy underscores the dangers of trying to do deals with dictators without a comprehensive, invasive and permanent inspection regime,” said Michael McFaul, who was Mr. Obama’s ambassador to Russia. “It also shows the limits of doing deals with Putin. Surely, the Russians must have known about these C.W.”

Putting the best face on it, former Obama advisers argued that it was still better to have removed 1,300 tons of chemical weapons from Syria even if Mr. Assad cheated and kept some, or later developed more. “Imagine what Syria would look like without that deal,” said Antony J. Blinken, a former deputy secretary of state. “It would be awash in chemical weapons which would fall into the hands of ISIS, Al Nusra or other groups.”

Still, the administration knew all along that it had probably not gotten all of the chemical weapons, and tried to get Russia to help press Syria, without success. “We always knew we had not gotten everything, that the Syrians had not been fully forthcoming in their declaration,” Mr. Blinken said.

Even before last week’s chemical attack, many veterans of Mr. Obama’s team considered his handling of Syria his biggest failing and expressed regret that their administration could not stop a civil war that has left more than 400,000 dead and millions displaced. [Continue reading…]

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We anti-Assad Syrians hail the U.S. strike — but fear it could be an empty gesture

Haid Haid writes: Syrians opposed to the Assad regime – like me – have largely welcomed the US missile strikes against a regime airbase in Homs. However, their praise is mixed with fears over the US endgame in Syria. Is this a one-off retaliation attack to send a warning against any future use of chemical weapons? Are the Americans, once again, interested only in preventing chemical assaults? Or are the US strikes part of a wider strategy to protect Syrian civilians from all types of war crimes? In other words, does the attack represent a significant shift in US policy towards the Syrian regime and will they do anything about it?

It is a pleasant surprise for Syrians who have been resisting the regime for more than six years to see the US acting against Bashar al-Assad for the first time. But their cautious optimism is mixed with regret that the international community did not act sooner. “I could not believe it when I heard the news about the US strikes,” said Rami Khalil, a Syrian activist who witnessed Assad’s chemical attack in Ghouta, in the Damascus countryside, in 2013. “It felt good to know that someone still cares about us. But my heart aches when I think that my family members and friends who I have lost could still be alive if Assad had been stopped,” he added.

The limited US focus on preventing chemical attacks will not stop the killing of civilians. The signs communicated by the Trump administration largely indicate that there is still no significant shift in the US administration towards Syria. The US secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, said the strikes did not indicate a shift in US policy. In other words, Islamic State, not Assad, is still the priority in Syria for the US.

The strikes, therefore, seem to be an aggressive warning to ensure the prevention of any further use of chemical assaults in Syria. But it is likely to have only a limited impact, if any, on Assad’s continued use of collective punishment tactics, such as barrel bombs and starvation, against civilians in their homes, hospitals, markets and schools. [Continue reading…]

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North Korea says Syria airstrikes prove its nukes justified

The Associated Press reports: North Korea has vowed to bolster its defenses to protect itself against airstrikes like the ones President Donald Trump ordered against an air base in Syria.

The North called the airstrikes “absolutely unpardonable” and said they prove its nuclear weapons are justified to protect the country against Washington’s “evermore reckless moves for a war.”

The comments were made by a Foreign Ministry official and carried Sunday by North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency. The report did not name the official, which is common in KCNA reports. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. strikes mark a new turn in Syria and beyond. Destination unknown

Hassan Hassan writes: The decision of the US finally to punish Bashar al-Assad for the use of chemical weapons against civilians will turn out to be, no doubt, a catalyst for a new chapter in the Syrian conflict. Even though US officials repeatedly emphasised the missile strikes on the Shayrat airfield were a one-off punitive measure, the unprecedented move comes amid a set of turning points in different parts of Syria and in the way foreign actors operate there. It is against the backdrop of these changes that the regime’s logic behind the use of chemical weapons should be viewed.

Paradoxically, recent changes in the conflict have seemed to favour the regime. Exactly one week before the missile attack, American officials gave Assad something he long wanted, namely, a new stated policy that his removal was no longer a US objective. This came in the form of top-level remarks from Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, and Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, stating that the long-term status of Assad would be decided by the Syrian people .

The message was cause for celebration in Damascus, especially as the about-face reflects the approach of the opposition’s regional and international backers in recent months. [Continue reading…]

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Haley: No political solution in Syria while Assad remains in power

CNN reports: US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said in an interview airing Sunday on CNN that until Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is out of power, she doesn’t see a political solution to the conflict in Syria.

“There’s not any sort of option where a political solution is going to happen with Assad at the head of the regime,” Haley told “State of the Union” anchor Jake Tapper. “It just — if you look at his actions, if you look at the situation, it’s going to be hard to see a government that’s peaceful and stable with Assad.”

Haley’s remarks come just a day after she warned that the United States was prepared to take further actions in Syria during a special session at the UN following a US military strike against a Syrian air base. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: The White House has sought to cast the mission — which came in response to evidence that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime had carried out an attack on civilians with the nerve agent sarin — as a major success in putting Assad on notice that he can no longer use such weapons without consequences. Officials announced Saturday that Trump had spoken with King Salman of Saudi Arabia, who offered support for his decision.

But Saturday brought fresh reminders that a single U.S. attack would hardly dissuade Assad from his brutal campaign to crush a six-year rebellion that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Residents in the northwestern town of Khan Sheikhoun, where at least 86 people had been killed in the sarin attack, reported that Syrian warplanes had returned and dropped new conventional bombs.

Since a U.S. Navy destroyer launched the missiles early Friday in Syria, the Trump administration has struggled to explain how the attack — which came four years after President Barack Obama chose not to strike Assad unilaterally after a similar use of chemical weapons — fits into its broader policy on Syria and the Middle East. [Continue reading…]

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Syria airstrikes instantly added nearly $5 billion to stock value of Tomahawk missile maker

Fortune reports: Raytheon stock surged Friday morning, after 59 of the company’s Tomahawk missiles were used to strike Syria in Donald Trump’s first major military operation as President.

Trump ordered the airstrike on the Syrian government Thursday night in retaliation for a deadly chemical weapons attack on civilians earlier this week that killed as many as 100 people. The U.S. blamed the attack on the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The Tomahawk missile used in the strike is made by Raytheon, whose stock opened 2.5% higher Friday, adding more than $1 billion to the defense contractor’s market capitalization.[Continue reading…]

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So Trump attacked Assad. What now?

Charles Lister writes: After six years of committing unrestrained and uninhibited violence against his own population, the regime of Bashar Assad experienced the first pangs of justice early Friday morning Syria time, as 59 American Tomahawk cruise missiles struck the strategically vital Al-Shayrat air base in the center of the country. Syrian military aircraft, hardened hangars and refueling facilities were among the targets of America’s first explicit attack on the Assad regime.

This was a justified, proportionate and necessary response for what had been a flagrant war crime committed three days earlier, when chemical nerve agents were dropped by planes from Al-Shayrat onto residential areas of Khan Sheikhoun, a town in Syria’s northwest. As men, women and children alike lost control of their muscles, succumbed to uncontrollable convulsions and began foaming from the mouth and nose, emergency and medical personnel rushed to the scene. They then found their facilities targeted in a series of follow-up bombings, possibly by Russian jets. At least 87 people lost their lives and more than 300 others were injured. This was merely the latest of dozens of chemical attacks conducted by the Assad regime since 2012, the worst of which killed more than 1,400 people east of Damascus in August 2013.

It was that heinous act in 2013, conducted within eyesight of Assad’s own presidential palace, that famously crossed then-President Barack Obama’s self-declared “red line.” That same attack led to Obama’s subsequent decision to back away from the use of force in favor of an agreement brokered by Russia to remove Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles in their entirety, a move that angered America’s Arab allies and effectively ended any potential U.S. efforts to threaten Assad’s rule. At the drop of the hat, overt affiliation with the United States became a politically toxic label that moderate opposition groups sought either to hide or to dissolve.

Recent events have not only demonstrated the clear failure and abrogation of that agreement by the Assad regime, but the presence of Russian troops and possibly also aircraft at the Al-Shayrat airbase appears to suggest that Russia was not only aware of Assad having retained some portion of his chemical weapons, but may also have been in a position to prevent their use.[Continue reading…]

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Stopping Assad requires standing up to Moscow

Molly K. McKew writes: As U.S. Tomahawk missiles soared over the Mediterranean toward Syria’s al-Shayrat airbase, speculation was already flying about how the attack would affect the thaw in U.S.-Russia relations anticipated since Donald Trump took office. Was this a first sign that America’s new president was willing to stand up to Putin?

Arguably the more critical factor in the equation is Russia. To understand the Kremlin’s response to the U.S. strike, and to the preceding chemical attack in Syria, it’s important to face some brutal truths about Russia in Syria.

The U.S. warned Russian forces about the coming strike because we knew they were there. We knew Russians were at Shayrat airbase since at least November 2015. This is why Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev warned that this strike was “on the brink of combat clashes with Russia”: We were bombing a base from which he knew Russian forces guided operations.

In August 2015—well before the Kremlin announced its new Syrian campaign — Russia signed a comprehensive military agreement with Assad. This agreement gave Moscow virtual carte blanche in Syria, and gave Syria a status equivalent to occupied Abkhazia and South Ossetia rather than to other sovereign nations where Russian forces are housed.

Russian commanders coordinate the military strategy in Syria, and have been critical to reversing the course of the war against Assad. Russian forces coordinate all aspects of Syrian air power and airstrikes. They reinforced the infrastructure of Shayrat airbase—which supposedly had its chemical stockpiles removed in 2013. There is no chance that, in the course of reconstructing elements of the base, they were not made aware that there were chemical munitions present. [Continue reading…]

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As warplanes return to scene of sarin attack, Trump defends missile launch

The Guardian reports: In the quiet streets of Khan Sheikhun, people mourned the dead from a sarin attack, bracing for the next raid. At an airbase near Homs, government warplanes roared back into action, their targets unknown. And not far from his golf course in south Florida, the president of the United States cried out a defense on Twitter.

“The reason you don’t generally hit runways,” Donald Trump wrote, “is that they are easy and inexpensive to quickly fix (fill in and top)!”

The president’s exclamation followed a more formal justification of his decision to launch 59 missiles at a Syrian government airbase on Thursday, the first direct attack by the US against Bashar al-Assad after six years of civil war.

Trump sent Congress a letter invoking war powers as the authority behind his order, saying the strike was directed “in the vital national security and foreign policy interests” of the United States.

The missiles were meant “to degrade” Assad’s ability to conduct chemical weapons attacks, Trump wrote, and “to dissuade the Syrian regime from using or proliferating chemical weapons”.

On Saturday, with the airbase in action, warplanes killed a woman and injured one other person in Khan Sheikhun, monitoring groups said. It was not immediately clear where the planes came from, although the Syrian government and its Russian allies are the only airforces operating in the area.

It was also reported by monitoring groups that air strikes killed at least 18 people including five children in Urum al-Joz, another town in Idlib province, on Saturday. The toll was expected to rise.

The casualties were a bloody reminder that while Trump may have redrawn the US red line on chemical weapons use, there have been no clues to his views on the wider conflict. [Continue reading…]

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Iraq’s Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr urges Syria’s Assad to step down

AFP reports: Influential Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on Saturday called on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down, also calling on Washington and Moscow to stop intervening in the conflict.

The Najaf-based Shiite cleric condemned the killing of 87 people, including 31 children, in a suspected chemical attack last week in a rebel-held Syrian town that has been widely blamed on Damascus.

“I would consider it fair for President Bashar al-Assad to resign and leave power, allowing the dear people of Syria to avoid the scourge of war and terrorist oppression,” he said in a statement. [Continue reading…]

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Assad, taunting Trump, mounts new attacks on the town he gassed

The Daily Beast reports: Just hours after the U.S. damaged a Syrian airbase linked to a chemical weapons attack, the Assad regime and its Russian ally launched three airstrikes against the very same rebel-held town where Assad was accused of using poison gas to kill more than 100 men, women, and children on Tuesday.

The attacks on Khan Sheikhoun and seven other towns appeared to be both a taunt and a warning to President Donald Trump’s administration: that cruise missiles may have damaged the Shayrat air base, but Syria has many other bases, ample munitions, and the political will backed up by Russia to continue targeting civilians.

The latest airstrikes on Khan Sheikhoun utilized small conventional rockets, and there were no reported injuries, given that much of the population had fled the town. But at least 10 people were killed in a regime or Russian airstrike against Hish, just north of Khan Sheikhoun, a few hours before the 4:00 a.m. U.S. cruise missile attack.

In Irbin, east of Damascus, a woman and two children were killed and many civilians wounded in a regime airstrike on a public market and a mosque. There were also attacks on Jisr al Shughour, west of Idlib, the city of Douma east of Damascus, Dara’a, Latamnah, and Kafr Zeta in northern Hama.

Those who remained in Khan Sheikhoun, a town in the south of Idlib province, welcomed the U.S. intervention, but said they were worried that the Assad regime still has a powerful air force and 20 other air bases. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s words mean nothing

David Frum writes: If there was any one foreign policy position that Donald Trump stressed above all others, it was opposition to the use of force in Syria. Time has helpfully compiled Trump’s tweets on the subject dating back to 2013. For example:


These were not the idle thoughts of a distracted mind. Promises of no war in Syria were central to Donald Trump’s anti-Hillary Clinton messaging. Take, for example, to his interview with Reuters on October 26, 2016.

“What we should do is focus on ISIS. We should not be focusing on Syria,” said Trump, as he dined on fried eggs and sausage at his Trump National Doral golf resort. “You’re going to end up in World War Three over Syria if we listen to Hillary Clinton. You’re not fighting Syria any more, you’re fighting Syria, Russia and Iran, all right?”

That message—a vote for Clinton is a vote for World War III beginning in Syria—was pounded home by surrogates and by Trump’s social-media troll army.

Not even 100 days into his presidency, Trump has done exactly what he attacked Hillary Clinton for contemplating.

Some have described this reverse as “hypocritical.” This description is not accurate. A hypocrite says one thing while inwardly believing another. The situation with Donald Trump is much more alarming. On October 26, 2016, he surely meant what he said. It’s just that what he meant and said that day was no guide to what he would mean or say on October 27, 2016—much less April 6, 2017.

Voters and citizens can expect literally zero advance warning of what Donald Trump will do or won’t do. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s attack on Syria ‘divorced from any strategic political vision’ says analyst

Christian Science Monitor reports: [W]hile [the cruise missiles fired at Syria’s Shayrat airbase near Homs] may have chastened Mr. Assad, analysts say, they do not appear to signal a broader change of US policy on Syria that would pose a longer-term threat to his hold on power.

“This [missile attack] clearly indicates the president is willing to take decisive action when called for,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters late Thursday. “I would not in any way attempt to extrapolate that to a change in our policy or posture relative to our military activities in Syria today. There has been no change in that status.”

Those comments might offer some reassurance to Assad that the air strikes were more a slap on the wrist than the beginning of a knockout blow. And with the war in Syria slowly turning in his favor – and with his two key allies, Russia and Iran, continuing to stand by him – Assad looks likely to stay in power, a reality that Syria’s neighbors and the international community reluctantly have had to accept.

“We should not invest the limited American military attack with any strategic connotations so far,” says Fawaz Gerges, a Middle East expert at the London School of Economics (LSE). “It’s an attack divorced from any strategic political vision. It remains to be seen whether the Trump administration has any concrete ideas to find a political solution. I’m very skeptical.”

Mr. Gerges warns, however, that military action on its own, absent a strategy, is inherently hard to contain, and could lead to an unintended deepening of US military involvement if Russia and Iran redouble their support for Assad even as Syrian rebels try to use the US strikes as leverage. [Continue reading…]

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Syria strike gives Trump anti-Kremlin credential

Politico reports: In Russia, they call it kozyrnut’. It means “to play a trump card.”

Donald Trump’s missile strike this week against the Russian-backed Syrian regime not only damaged its chemical weapons program, it also happened to give the U.S. president a useful political tool.

Now, whenever anyone accuses Trump of being too cozy with Russia, he can point to the strike against Syria as evidence that he’s willing to defy the Kremlin: Kozyrnut’.

The missile strike on a Syrian airbase came just days before Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is due to visit Moscow, and the implications could be wide-ranging for Trump’s relationship with Russia, which kept its push-back largely rhetorical.

The political side effect, meanwhile, could burnish Trump’s defense against claims he is too close to Russia amid ongoing federal probes into whether Moscow tried to swing the 2016 election his way. [Continue reading…]

Or, as the most truthful purveyor of fake news, The Onion, tells the story: After ordering the first U.S. military attack against the regime of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, President Donald Trump held a press conference Friday to express his full confidence that the airstrike had completely wiped out the lingering Russian scandal. “Based on intelligence we have received over the past several hours, the attack on the al-Shayrat air base in Homs has successfully eliminated all discussions and allegations about my administration’s ties to the Russian government,” said Trump, adding that at approximately 4:40 a.m. local time, 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from U.S. naval ships obliterated all traces of the widespread controversy in news outlets across the media. [Continue reading…]

As for Politico’s claim that the missile strikes “damaged [Assad’s] chemical weapons program,” that would be very hard to substantiate on at least two counts. Firstly, given that this is a program that had supposedly already been dismantled, there’s been no indication that outside Syria there’s currently any reliable information on how much of the program was secretly kept in place. And secondly, the choice of the al-Shayrat air base as target for missile strikes appears to have derived solely from intelligence indicating that was the location from which chemical weapons-carrying aircraft took off — not the location at which these weapons were manufactured.

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