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Russia and Iran Condemn U.S. Strikes in Syria
By NEIL MacFARQUHARAPRIL 7, 2017

MOSCOW — Russia reacted harshly on Friday to the American strike against Syria, maintaining its view that its ally, President Bashar al-Assad, had not bombed his own people with chemical weapons and saying that the United States’ operation would further corrode already dismal relations between Moscow and Washington.

Iran, Russia’s main ally in the region in buttressing Mr. Assad, also condemned the American attack, which left six people dead, according to the Syrian Army. Speaking on state television, a spokesman for the Syrian Army described the missile strikes as an act of “flagrant aggression.”

The United States’ allies in Europe and the Middle East were supportive, but Dmitri S. Peskov, the spokesman for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, said the American strikes, which came in response to a chemical weapons attack in Idlib Province on Tuesday, represented a “significant blow” to American-Russian ties.

Mr. Putin considered the attack a breach of international law that had been made under a false pretext, Mr. Peskov said. Moscow also called on the United Nations Security Council to convene an emergency meeting, and the Russian Foreign Ministry said it was freezing an agreement with the United States to coordinate air operations over Syria.

“The Syrian Army has no chemical weapons at its disposal,” Mr. Peskov said, contradicting the position of the Trump administration and much of the international community, which has largely insisted that the Syrian military was responsible for the chemical attack.

Although Russia did not deploy its air defense system in Syria against the American cruise missiles, it flexed its muscles after the attack. The minister of defense, Sergei K. Shoigu, said that Russia would bolster Syria’s air defense systems, and the Russian news agency Tass reported that a frigate would enter the Mediterranean Sea on Friday and visit the logistics base at the Syrian port of Tartus.

The American cruise missile strikes on Friday on an airfield in Al Shayrat, which were aimed at Syrian fighter jets and other infrastructure, ignored the fact that “terrorists” had also used chemical weapons, Mr. Peskov said, without naming specific instances.

A spokesman for the Russian military, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, issued a statement calling the military effectiveness of the American airstrikes “extremely low,” with just 23 of the 59 missiles hitting the target.

The American missiles destroyed a warehouse of material and technical property, a training building, a canteen, six MIG-23 aircraft in repair hangars and a radar station, according to the Russian military. A Russian television reporter, Evgeny Poddubny, who was at the air base, said nine planes had been destroyed.

The assault in Idlib Province on Tuesday struck the town of Khan Sheikhoun, killing more than 80 people and sickening hundreds more. Turkey said on Thursday that sarin, a banned nerve agent, had been used in the attack, one of the worst atrocities of the Syrian war.

Bahram Ghasemi, a spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, said in a statement that his government condemned the American missile strikes, adding that they would lead to “the strengthening of failing terrorists” and complicate the situation in the region.

Mr. Ghasemi noted that Iran, as a major victim of chemical weapons attacks during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, condemned their use anywhere. But, he added, the accusations against Syria were as yet unproved.

In terms of the United States action, the statement said, Tehran “regards this unilateral measure as dangerous, destructive and a violation of international law.”

The British defense secretary, Michael Fallon, expressed support for the American missile strikes. “One of the purposes of this very limited and appropriate action was to deter the regime from using gas in this appalling way,” he told the BBC.

In a joint statement, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President François Hollande of France said that Mr. Assad, the Syrian president, “bears sole responsibility.”

A spokesman for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Ibrahim Kalin, said the American strikes had been a positive response to “war crimes” in Syria, where the six-year civil war has led to nearly 400,000 deaths and created a refugee crisis as millions sought to flee. Mr. Kalin also repeated Turkey’s call to immediately set up and enforce a no-fly zone to create safe areas in Syria for those fleeing the violence.

The American strikes were also praised by Israel and by Saudi Arabia, two crucial allies of the United States in the Middle East. In a statement carried by the state news agency SPA, a Saudi Arabian official called the strikes a “courageous decision” by President Trump. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said he hoped the action would “resonate not only in Damascus, but in Tehran, Pyongyang and elsewhere.”

Mr. Peskov gave no clear indication of how Russia, which the United States said had been given advance warning of the attack, might respond, and analysts suggested that the Kremlin had few options.

Russia could treat the strikes as a one-time event, limiting its response to criticizing the American aggression and thus conceding a revitalized American influence in the region. It could also try to confront the Americans more directly, but that would have unpredictable consequences.

“There will be many screams on the Russian television with people condemning the strikes, but everybody understands that this is just a symbolic act meant for Trump to look different from Obama,” Vladimir Frolov, a foreign affairs analyst, said in an interview. “There won’t be any tangible reaction; this was a one-off strike.”

Others suggested that the lack of a Russian military reaction on the ground in Syria pointed to a realistic approach.

“Its initial response was to huff and puff and call it unprovoked aggression, of course; it could do nothing less,” Mark Galeotti, an expert on the Russian military, wrote in an online commentary. He noted that Russia’s state-of-the-art air defense system, which had been deployed to Syria with great fanfare, was apparently not used against the American attack.

“Moscow might not like Washington’s response, but nor was it willing to stand in the way of it,” he said. “That is a heartening sign of realism.”

Moscow might wait to formulate a response until Tuesday, when Rex W. Tillerson, an old friend of the Kremlin, is set to make his first visit to Russia as the American secretary of state.

Mr. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said that the American attack would do nothing to advance the fight against international terrorism, which he called a priority for Mr. Putin and which he noted had also been a main pledge of the Trump campaign.

“Most important, from Putin’s point of view, this move doesn’t bring us closer to the end goal in a fight against international terrorism,” Mr. Peskov said. “On the contrary, this creates a serious obstacle for the building of an international coalition to fight it and to effectively resist this universal evil.”

Mr. Putin dispatched the Russian Army to Syria, which has long been Russia’s main ally in the Middle East, in September 2015 with the stated goal of fighting terrorism, although the main purpose of the deployment was to shore up Mr. Assad, whose rule was faltering.

Other officials were quick to compare the cruise missile attack to other American interventions, in the Middle East and elsewhere, that had ended poorly.

The Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, compared the attack to the American invasion of Iraq. “This is reminiscent of the 2003 situation, when the United States and the United Kingdom, along with their allies, invaded Iraq without the U.N. Security Council’s consent,” Mr. Lavrov said on Friday at a news conference after a meeting in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, between foreign ministers of the former Soviet states.

The question of whether the United States invaded Iraq without the approval of the Security Council has long been a matter of debate. Washington has asserted that previous resolutions gave it the authority to take action, but critics have argued that it needed explicit United Nations approval.

Russia has repeatedly defended Syria against the accusation that Damascus has used chemical weapons. In this case, Moscow said that the strike on Tuesday had actually hit a chemical weapons warehouse controlled by insurgents, a version of events that has been widely dismissed by the West.

General Konashenkov also repeated the Russian assertion that all chemical weapons had been removed from Syrian government stockpiles and called on the United States to present any evidence proving that Damascus had used them.

Mr. Peskov asserted that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons had declared Syria to be free of chemical weapons, although that is not quite true.

In an initial statement after the attack on Tuesday, the organization said it was seriously concerned about the allegations and wanted to gather more information before coming to a judgment.

“The O.P.C.W. strongly condemns the use of chemical weapons by anyone, anywhere and under any circumstances,” the group said in the statement.

Mr. Peskov said that the United States had launched its attack to distract attention from the high number of civilian casualties caused by a recent American airstrike in Mosul, Iraq.

Separately, the Russian Ministry of Defense and other officials said the American mission was too complicated to have been set up in a few days, so Washington must have planned it long ago and claimed a fake chemical weapons attack as a pretext.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/07/world/middleeast/russia-iran-us-strikes-syria.html?