U.S. fires missiles at Assad airbase

The United States fired dozens of cruise missiles at a Syrian airbase on Friday from which it said a deadly chemical weapons attack was launched this week, an escalation of the U.S. military role in Syria that swiftly drew sharp criticism from Russia.

Two U.S. warships fired 59 cruise missiles from the eastern Mediterranean Sea at the Syrian airbase controlled by forces of President Bashar al-Assad in response to a poison gas attack in a rebel-held area on Tuesday, U.S. 
officials said.

Facing his biggest foreign policy crisis since his Jan. 20 inauguration, President Donald Trump took the toughest direct U.S. action yet in Syria’s six-year-old civil war, raising the risk of confrontation with Russia and Iran, Assad’s two main military backers.

Russian President Vladimir Putin believes that the missile strikes on a Syrian air base broke international law and have seriously hurt U.S.-Russia relations, news agencies cited the Kremlin 
as saying.

The Russian leader regarded the U.S. action as “aggression against a sovereign nation” on a “made-up pretext” and as a cynical attempt to distract the world from civilian deaths in Iraq, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov was cited as saying.

U.S. officials said they informed Russian forces ahead of the missile attacks and that they took pains to avoid hitting Russian troops at the base, saying there were no strikes on sections of the base where Russians were present. But they said the administration did not seek Moscow’s approval.
REUTERS, 
07th APRIL, 2017