A Syrian airbase struck by U.S. missiles has been rendered useless, according to President Trump’s spokesman, who dismissed reports that President Bashar Assad’s air force continued to use the facility after the attack last week.
“Their ability to operate successfully out of that airbase is gone,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters at Monday’s press briefing.
The days following the attack have seen dueling accounts of the effectiveness of the U.S. strike, during which 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles were launched at an airbase that Western powers believe Assad’s military used to launch a chemical weapons attack last week. Spicer came to the briefing armed with new details about the extent of the damage and mocked Assad’s public show of resilience
“As a PR stunt, they took some pre-fueled planes, pushed them over to make it look like nothing [had happened], but make no mistake about it: their radar capability is gone, their fueling capability is gone, and a good chunk of their aircraft is gone,” Spicer said.
He claimed that “over 20 percent of [the Assad regime’s] fixed wing aircraft from their entire air force was taken out” in the attack. “That’s a huge success,” he said. Previous reports said 20 jets were destroyed during the attacks.
It’s a tactic that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime would not like to see repeated. Russia and Iran issued a joint statement threatening to defend the regime from future U.S. military action.
“What America waged in an aggression on Syria is a crossing of red lines,” the Russian government said in a joint statement with Iran, Assad’s other key ally. “From now on we will respond with force to any aggressor or any breach of red lines from whoever it is and America knows our ability to respond well.”
Russia has deployed modern anti-aircraft weapons to Syria, a defense system they plan to bolster in light of last week’s strike. Those defenses are one of the reasons that U.S. military planners used naval-based missiles for the strike; the defenses were too far away to intercept cruise missile attacks on that base. “All this talk that we have secured the whole of Syrian airspace is artistic whistling,” Pavel Felgengauer, a Russian military analyst, told Radio Free Europe. “You can more or less defend a perimeter of about 40 kilometers.”
