“Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria”, Trump tweeted. “Get ready Russian Federation, because they will be coming, nice and new and ‘smart!'”, Trumpwrote in a post on Twitter.
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Fielding questions at the White House, Trump press secretary Sarah Sanders said it would be “outrageous” to say that Trump’s recent announcement that he intends to remove all US forces from Syria in the coming months had emboldened Assad.
Trump had on Monday warned of a quick, forceful response once responsibility for the Syria attack was established.
The suspected chemical weapons attack late on Saturday killed at least 60 people, with more than 1000 injured at several sites in Douma, a city near the capital, Damascus, according to a Syrian aid organisation.
Activists said Syrian forces used chlorine gas in the attack against Douma, the last rebel-held area in the Eastern Ghouta countryside of Damascus.
Pro-government forces in Syria are emptying main airports and military air bases over possible USA strikes, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, said on Wednesday.
“We can’t let atrocities like we all witnessed – and you can see that and it’s terrible – we can’t let that happen”, Trump said at the start of a meeting with senior military leadership on Monday, including his new national security adviser John Bolton. The Defense Ministry said Syrian defense units destroyed five of the incoming missiles.
Israel, which has previously hit Syrian targets, has not commented.
Despite the global revulsion over chemical weapons attacks, the death toll from such incidents in Syria is only a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of combatants and civilians killed since the war began in 2011.
The attack in Douma was reported soon after Assad forces renewed their push on the last rebel enclave in eastern Ghouta.
Syria accused Israel on Monday of carrying out overnight missile strikes on a major airfield, after earlier saying it suspected the United States of being behind the attack. Those strikes did little to dampen the Syrian regime’s abilities to carry out these type of attacks, and reports at the time indicated planes were taking off from the airstrip soon after the USA strikes ended.
“Whenever we propose anything meaningful on Syria, Russia vetoes it”.
Images and videos, which can not be independently verified, showed dozens of bodies, including children and women, many with foam streaming from the nose and mouth. The US and Western allies said they agreed to work together.
While Russian President Vladimir Putin has zero presence on Twitter, other branches of the government have dabbled in social media diplomacy. In a statement, it said a fact-finding mission was gathering information from all available sources to establish whether chemical weapons were used.
Russian representative Vassily Nebenzia said the alleged attack was staged and warned that U.S. military action in response could have “grave repercussions”.
President Donald Trump is now weighing a much larger strike to send a clear message, the New York Times reports.
Syria is not a significant oil producer, but any sign of conflict in the region triggers concern about crude flows across the wider Middle East. Reports of missiles in Riyadh exacerbated those worries, on top of existing concerns the United States could renew sanctions against Iran.
The opposition blamed president Bashar Assad’s forces for the attack, accusations the government strongly denies.
Russian Federation has said its military specialists found no evidence of a chemical attack, and suggested that rebels staged or spread rumors of an attack to pin the blame on Damascus.
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Then, during the meeting with top military leaders, he said the weekend assault “will be met and it will be met forcefully”.
