In the quiet streets of Khan Sheikun this week, as people wept for and buried the dead from a sarin attack, they also braced for the sound of warplanes in the skies above them, and the next attack.
On Saturday the planes came back, killing a woman and injuring one other person, 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.
The casualties were a bloody reminder that while Donald Trump may have redrawn the US red line on chemical weapons use, there have been no clues to his views on the wider conflict, which grinds on much as it has for six years.
The president remained in Florida on Saturday, attending one of his golf courses and using Twitter only to acknowledge the missile strike that was launched on Thursday night.
“Congratulations to our great military men and women for representing the United States, and the world, so well in the Syria attack,” he wrote.
In Washington, uncertainty reigned over what step, if any, Trump will take next to build on the momentum from the missile strikes. His team has cast the strikes, which targeted the base used to launch the sarin that fell on Khan Sheikun on Tuesday, as a contained response to the specific horror of chemical weapons.
But Trump is known to act on instinct more than past presidents and it is suddenly far from clear whether he is an isolationist or interventionist.
“I am flexible, and I’m proud of that flexibility,” he said this week.
A front-page headline in Saturday’s New York Times described “a one-time strike”. It quoted military officials as saying “it was never intended to be the leading edge of a broader campaign to dislodge Mr Assad from power, or force a political settlement”.
But an administration that just prior to the chemical attack was describing Bashar al-Assad’s continued rule as “political reality” is now ducking questions about whether Trump believes Assad should leave power.
“I think, first and foremost, the president believes that the Syrian government, the Assad regime should, at the minimum, agree to abide by the agreements that they made not to use chemical weapons,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer said on Friday, declining to comment on future plans.
“He’s not going to telegraph his next move,” Spicer said in Palm Beach, Florida, where the president held talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
An editorial in the Washington Post suggested a different emphasis. “The administration now appears to understand that the civil war – and the fuel it provides for the Islamic State and other extremists – can never be ended while the Assad regime remains in power,” it argued.
The only strategy the White House has been willing to discuss is additional economic sanctions, overseen by treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin.
It is time for all civilised nations to stop the horrors that are taking place in Syria and demand a political solution
Nikki Hayley, UN ambassador
The Pentagon has indicated that there are no further plans to move against Assad as the war against Islamic State and other extremists continues, although Nikki Haley, ambassador to the United Nations, did not rule out going beyond the “very measured step” of launching missile strikes.
“We are prepared to do more,” she told an emergency meeting of the UN security council. “But we hope that will not be necessary. It is time for all civilised nations to stop the horrors that are taking place in Syria and demand a political solution.”
In Washington, Gen Joseph Dunford, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, held a closed-door meeting with senators on Friday afternoon, apparently focusing on the complexity of a brutal conflict.
Assad is fighting a fractured opposition dominated by Islamists, many of whom dream of creating a Sunni theocracy. The chaos that engulfed Iraq and Libya after the overthrow of autocratic rulers haunts any proposal to remove the president from power.
“We don’t have the benefit of a larger strategy,” Senator John Cornyn of Texas told reporters after the session with Dunford. “[For] the same reason I think the administration [has] difficulty coming up with a strategy, because it’s very, very complicated.
“We … need a strategy to figure out what is our goals in Syria. Is our goal just to defeat Isis or is our goal to change the regime, and if there is policy to change the regime what comes next?”
Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who have long advocated for decisive action in Syria, called for “a new, comprehensive strategy” to end the Syrian conflict, including safe zones and more support for the “vetted opposition” but starting with more strikes.
“The first measure in such a strategy,” they said, “must be to take Assad’s air force – which is responsible not just for the latest chemical weapons attack, but countless atrocities against the Syrian people – completely out of the fight”.
Trump is profoundly unpredictable, with his decision to launch missile strikes apparently driven by a visceral reaction to images from the scene of the chemical attack, of young children foaming at the mouth and lifeless babies on the ground.
“It had a big impact on me,” he told reporters the following day.
For rebel groups who have for years demanded more international support in the fight against Assad, the US missile strikes brought limited relief.
Opposition activists said they were happy that at least one brutal weapon had apparently been declared off limits, but pointed out that most of the tens of thousands of civilian victims of the war had died in conventional attacks.
“Ameera Skaf was killed by Assad and Russian warplanes in Doma today,” said activist Abdulkafi al Hamdo, sharing pictures of a toddler he said had been killed on Friday by pro-government forces.
“Not only chemical [weapons] kills our children.”
Still, some said they hoped that now Trump had revised his position on Assad, he might be persuaded to intervene further.
Turkey is among voices calling on the US to do more, and push Assad to leave office. It supports opposition groups and has long pushed for the Syrian leader’s ouster.
“If this intervention is limited only to an airbase, if it does not continue and if we don’t remove the regime from heading Syria, then this would remain a cosmetic intervention,” said foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, speaking in the southern city of Antalya.
In a sign of how the chemical weapons attack has roiled the region, the influential Iraqi Shia cleric Moqtada al Sadr, leader of a militia that fought the US occupation of Iraq, added his voice to calls for Assad to step down.
“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 that also demanded Washington and Moscow disengage from the civil war.
Russia’s support for Assad and military presence on the ground is the biggest question hanging over Trump’s options for action in Syria. The greatest fear is that miscalculation could bring the two nuclear-armed powers into direct conflict.
The UK foreign minister, Boris Johnson, on Saturday cancelled a planned visit to Moscow. “We deplore Russia’s continued defence of the Assad regime even after the chemical weapons attack on innocent civilians,” Johnson said.
At the same time, a Russian warship equipped with cruise missiles arrived to join a battlegroup off the coast of Syria.
Rex Tillerson, Trump’s secretary of state, is set to travel to Moscow this week for a now critical meeting. He has condemned Russia’s support for “a regime that carries out these types of horrendous attacks on their own people”.
As Trump’s team pondered his next steps, Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev warned that the US missile strike was “good news for terrorists” and had brought Moscow and Washington to the verge of a “military clash”.
It was also confirmed on Saturday that Russia had suspended communications with the US aimed at avoiding clashes between forces from the two countries in Syria.
(TheGuardian US )
