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 US military role in Syria that swiftly drew sharp criticism from Russia.
Two US 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, US officials said.
Facing his biggest foreign policy crisis since his Jan. 20 inauguration, President Donald Trump took the toughest direct US 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.
The Tomahawk missiles were launched from the USS Porter and USS Ross around 8:40 p.m. EDT (0040 GMT on Friday), striking multiple targets - including the airstrip, aircraft and fuel stations - on the Shayrat Air Base, which the Pentagon says was used to store chemical weapons.
At least six Syrian soldiers, including a senior officer, were killed in the attack, which almost completely destroyed the base, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Trump sought to cast the attack, which took place as he and Xi were wrapping up a dinner of Dover sole and dry-aged New York strip steak, as an effort to deter Syria from using chemical weapons in the future.
"Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad launched a horrible chemical weapons attack on innocent civilians," he said later. "Tonight I ordered a targeted military strike on the airfield in Syria from where the chemical attack was launched."
"It is in this vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons," Trump added.
Syrian state TV
Syrian state TV said that "American aggression" had targeted a Syrian military base with "a number of missiles and cited a Syrian military source as saying the strike had "led to losses."
Russian President Vladimir Putin
Russian President Vladimir Putin believes that the missile strikes on a Syrian air base broke international law and have seriously hurt US-Russia relations, news agencies cited the Kremlin as saying.
The Russian leader regarded the US 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.
US 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.
"Years of previous attempts at changing Assad’s behavior have all failed and failed very dramatically," Trump said as he announced the attack from his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, where he was meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Russia has air and ground forces in Syria after intervening there on Assad's side in 2015 and turning the tide against mostly Sunni Muslim rebel groups.
Trump has so far focused his Syria policy almost exclusively on defeating Islamic State militants in northern Syria, where US Special Forces support Arab and Kurdish armed groups.