Sen. Mike Rounds said the USA should target President Bashar Assad’s “command and control system” in retaliation for a chemical-weapons attack on civilians last weekend in a rebel-held suburb of Damascus.
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The politician said the Syrian government was expecting a limited USA strike, similar to the one on Shayrat air base previous year, which came after an alleged chemical attack on a rebel-held town in northern Syria that killed dozens of people.
Wall Street’s newest worry – rising geopolitical tensions after President Trump warned of a USA strike on Syria – dragged stock prices lower Wednesday.
That doesn’t mean Americans shouldn’t worry about how Trump might try to use strikes in Syria to divert attention away from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russian Federation probe, help himself electorally or encourage calamitous wars with Iran or even North Korea. The tweet followed Russia’s warning that it will strike at incoming USA missiles and their launch platforms. He said killing Mr. Assad would be “the ultimate deterrent to dictators” who use chemical weapons or sponsor terrorism. After the threat, the president said in a separate tweet that relations between the United States and Russian Federation are worse than ever.
In the alleged poison gas attack in Douma on Saturday, pro-opposition rescue workers and doctors tell NPR’s Ruth Sherlock that 42 people were killed.
The EASA cited a risk of “intermittent disruption of radio navigation equipment” for commercial flights in the region in case of military action. Sullivan and Johnson agreed that based on reports in the media and from the ground, “this attack bore hallmarks of previous chemical weapons attacks by the Assad regime”, the British foreign office said. Russian military advisers are deployed at many Syrian Government facilities.
He described the situation in Syria as “rather tense”, but declined to specify how Moscow would respond to a USA airstrike against its ally Assad.
“GPS receivers in most drones can be fairly easily jammed”, Dr. Todd Humphreys, the director of the Radionavigation Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin said.
In 2013, the Obama administration seemed to pull off a diplomatic slam dunk with Syria.
“The situation is pretty bad, but it shouldn’t be overdramatized”, Alexei Malashenko, a leading Russian expert on Syria said in televised remarks.
An even more threatening situation may evolve if the US and its allies use manned aircraft, and the Russian strike results in casualties. When Trump ordered airstrikes previous year after a chemical weapons attack, it was a response to the use of sarin gas, which is banned by the Chemical Weapons Convention that Syria has signed.
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A World Health Organization statement Wednesday did not confirm outright that a chemical weapons attack had taken place.
