White House homeland security adviser Tom Bossert said nothing should be taken “off the table” after reports of a suspected chemical attack in Syria.
“I wouldn’t take anything off the table,” Bossert said on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday when asked if President Trump could launch another missile strike, similar to last year’s attack on a Syrian air base.
“These are horrible photos, we’re looking into the attack at this point. The State Department put out a statement last night and the president’s senior national security cabinet had been talking with him and with each other all throughout the evening and this morning and myself included,” Bossert added.
Earlier Sunday, Trump condemned the suspected chemical attack on Twitter, telling Syrian President Bashar Assad there will be a “big price to pay.”
Syria and its allies denied the Assad regime was behind any chemical weapons attack.
The U.S. State Department said in a statement that it had seen “multiple, very disturbing reports this afternoon regarding another possible CW (chemical weapons) attack near a hospital in Douma, Syria.”
The attack in the rebel-held city of Douma in Eastern Ghouta on Saturday left at least 42 people dead.
Saturday’s attack makes Trump’s latest statements on Syria complicated — he has said repeatedly he wants to pull an estimated 2,000 U.S. troops from the war-ravaged country.
In a Wednesday announcement, the White House said the U.S.’s mission in Syria “is coming to a rapid end.”
In a statement, the White House said the Islamic State is “almost completely destroyed” but that the U.S. remains “committed to eliminating the small ISIS presence in Syria that our forces have not already eradicated.”
But the U.S. military kept up attacks on the Islamic State over the past week.
A total of nine airstrikes were carried out by U.S. forces on Islamic State fighters and vehicles in Syria as well as the group’s buildings, hideouts, supply routes, and fighters in Iraq, U.S. Central Command reported Friday.
When asked if “we should get out of there,” Bossert said Sunday the president has “got a point.”
“The pendulum has swung in the wrong direction for too long and the United States of America has been taking off in their responsibility to provide security for the entire world,” he said. “It is time to move that pendulum back in a way that brings regional partners and others with equities in these matters all around the globe into putting their resources and their treasure and their boys and girls on the line, and not just American troops.”
Trump launched a missile strike against Syria about a year ago in response to a chemical attack earlier that week that had killed dozens of civilians.
