UNITED STATES (VOP TODAY NEWS) – US President Donald Trump said on Sunday that a “heavy price” would be paid for a chemical attack on a besieged city controlled by opposition fighters in Syria, where medical aid groups reported dozens of deaths with poison gas.
While international officials are trying to confirm the chemical attack late on Saturday in the city of Duma, Trump took a rare step by directly criticizing Russian President Vladimir Putin over the incident.
Syria has denied government forces any chemical attack, and Russia’s strongest ally, President Bashar al-Assad, has described the reports as false.
Trump threatened to take action, although it was unclear what he meant. Last year he agreed to strike a cruise missile against a Syrian air base after a sarin gas attack on civilians.
“Many have died, including women and children, in a reckless chemical attack in Syria,” Trump wrote in a tweet on Twitter. The region that witnessed this terrible act is besieged and encircled by the Syrian army so that access to it from the outside world is not possible in full. ”
“President Putin, Russia and Iran are responsible for supporting Assad’s animal. High price will pay. ”
The Russian Foreign Ministry warned against any military action based on “fabricated and fabricated arguments” and said that could lead to serious consequences.
A joint statement by the Syrian-American Medical Association and civil defense agencies operating in areas controlled by opposition forces said 49 people had died in the attack.
A European diplomat said Western allies would prepare a file based on photographs, video footage, eyewitness accounts and satellite footage of Syrian airliners. But he made it clear that it would be difficult to take samples from the ground.
The UN Security Council will hold two meetings on Monday following separate requests from Russia and the United States.
UN war crimes investigators have previously documented 33 chemical attacks in Syria, 27 of which have been attributed to the Syrian government, which has repeatedly denied the use of such weapons.
Russia has repeatedly blocked efforts to hold Syria accountable both at the United Nations and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
– Horrible pictures –
Trump said last week he wanted to withdraw US troops from Syria, although his advisers asked him to wait to see if the hardline Islamic state was defeated and to prevent Iran’s ally Assad from gaining a foothold there.
There are about 2,000 US troops on the ground in Syria to help fight against the organization of the Islamic state.
Republican Senator John McCain said Assad was “encouraged” by Trump’s comments on the withdrawal from Syria and that the US president must now respond decisively.
“President Trump was quick to criticize Assad today, along with the Russian and Iranian governments, of Tuter,” McCain said in a statement. The question now is whether he will do anything about it. ”
A senior Trump security adviser said on Sunday the United States was not ruling out another missile attack.
Thomas Bossert, White House adviser on homeland security and counterterrorism, said in an interview with ABC’s “The Week”. “I do not rule out anything.”
“We are studying the attack at the moment,” he said, adding that the pictures were “shocking.”
A videotape broadcast by activists showed about 12 bodies of children, women and men and the mouths of some of them with foam. “The city is always on April 7,” the voice said in the video. “There is a strong smell here.”
Reuters was unable to verify the reports.
The television footage of the dead children was a factor that prompted Trump to bomb Syria last year.
Two officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Trump was likely to wait for a “very credible” final assessment of the intelligence services that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons.
An official said that the presence of Russian troops in a number of Syrian military bases complicates the process of selecting the possible targets of any attack.
Some in the administration believe Russian forces should not be seen as immune to attacks because of Moscow’s support for Assad, but officials said Putin would consider any loss of Russian lives or equipment to be a deliberate escalation and would likely respond with increased support for Assad or other means.
– New team in the White House –
Trump was scheduled to hold a meeting at the White House on Monday with senior military commanders.
Trump has reshuffled his national security team over the past two weeks, sacking national security adviser HR McMaster and replacing John Bolton, a former UN ambassador known for his hardline positions. He is due to take office on Monday.
Bolton praised Trump’s missile attack on Syria last year, although he generally focused on Iran as a greater threat to national security.
A senior US official said senior White House officials were not aware of Bolton’s advice to Trump about Syria.
But US officials have said Trump is determined to withdraw US troops from Syria despite warnings of consequences from Defense Secretary Jim Matisse and other military commanders.
– Underground shelters –
The attack on al-Ghouta was one of the fiercest attacks in the seven-year-old Syrian war and the Syrian Human Rights Observatory said it had dropped more than 1,600 civilian deaths.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it could not confirm the use of a chemical weapon in Saturday’s attack.
The Syrian-American Medical Association said a chlorine bomb hit a hospital in Douma, killing six people, and a second attack using a “mix of elements”, including nerve gas, hit a nearby building.
Bassel Termanini, vice president of the US-based Syrian-American Medical Association, told Reuters 35 other people had been killed in the building, most of them women and children.
The joint statement of the Syrian American Medical Association and the Syrian Civil Defense said that the medical centers received more than 500 cases of people suffering from difficulty breathing and get out of their mouths and the smell of chlorine smell.
Tawfiq al-Shamma, a Syrian doctor based in Geneva and working with the Union of Relief and Medical Care Organizations, a network of Syrian doctors, said 150 people had been confirmed dead and the number was increasing. Most of them were civilians, women and children trapped in underground shelters, he told Reuters.
It is located in the eastern Ghouta area near Damascus. Assad regained control of almost all of the eastern Ghouta from armed groups in a Russian-backed military campaign launched in February. He is always left in the hands of opposition fighters.
Control of Douma will ensure the biggest victory by Syrian government forces since 2016 and will confirm Assad’s staunch position in the war that has killed thousands of people since it was exacerbated by protests against his rule in 2011.
