Beirut: Residents of the Syrian town devastated by a chemical weapons attack on Tuesday said warplanes had returned to bomb them on Saturday, despite a US missile barrage and warnings of possible further response.
At least 86 people in the northwestern town of Khan Shaikhoun were killed on Tuesday in a chemical attack that left hundreds choking, fitting or foaming at the mouth. Eyewitnesses and a monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said on Saturday that fresh attacks on the area — now a virtual ghost town — had killed one woman and wounded several others.
Photographs from the site showed a pair of green slippers, abandoned by a blood-spattered doorway.
Residents cowered in bedrooms and basements throughout Saturday, underscoring the apparently unchanged threat they faced from the Syrian government’s arsenal of rockets, barrel bombs and other weapons that have resulted in a majority of the conflict’s half-million dead.
In retaliation for Tuesday’s chemical assault, President Donald Trump ordered missile strikes on a Syrian airfield housing a jet fleet responsible for extensive bombing across northern Syria.
The missile barrage is the first direct military action the United States has taken against Syrian President Bashar Al Assad’s government in the six-year-long conflict. Although Trump warned of possible further intervention, the Pentagon has said no other strikes against government targets are in current plans.
Although American officials predicted that the strikes would result in a major shift of Al Assad’s calculus, they appeared to be symbolic in practice. Within 24 hours of the attack, monitoring groups reported that jets were taking off from the bombed Shayrat airbase once again, this time to bomb Daesh positions.
There were also reports of Syrian government and Russian air strikes across the provinces of Damascus, Aleppo, Idlib and Daraa, all killing civilians. However, there were no reports of further use of chemical weapons.
“The American strikes did nothing for us. They can still commit massacres at anytime,” said Majed Khattab, speaking by phone from Khan Shaikhoun. “No one here can sleep properly, people are really afraid.”
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu described Trump’s decision to retaliate as welcome, but not enough.
“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,” he said.
A longtime backer of Syria’s armed opposition, Turkey is now overseeing a stuttering peace process in the Kazakh capital, Astana, that it hopes will hasten an end to the war.
Elsewhere in the region, a leading Iraqi Shiite cleric and militia leader, Moqtada Al Sadr, called on Al Assad to step down and “save Syria before it’s too late.”
“President Bashar Al Assad should resign and leave power for the love of Syria, allowing the dear people of Syria to avoid war and the scourge of terrorism,” he said.
Although some of Iraq’s Shiite militias that are more directly linked to Iran have fought in support of Assad in Syria, Al Sadr’s Peace Brigades have not, and the cleric promotes himself as a nationalist.
In his statement he also criticised US and Russian intervention in the country. “I call for a military retreat from Syria by everyone,” he said. “They are the only ones who have the right to decide their fate.”
In a sign of the continuing diplomatic fallout from the chemical attack and the US response, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson announced on Saturday that he had cancelled a planned visit to Moscow.
Johnson was to fly to Moscow on Monday to meet his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, in what would have been the first such meeting since 2012. But Johnson said in a statement that “developments in Syria have changed the situation fundamentally.”
“We deplore Russia’s continued defence of Al Assad regime even after the chemical weapons attack on innocent civilians,” Johnson said.
Britain has been supportive of this week’s US air strikes against a Syrian airbase but has said it has no plans to join the United States in any future attacks on Syrian government targets.
