We stand by Trump in his missile attack retaliation to Assad's chemical attack

THE complexities of the civil war that has torn Syria apart for the past six years were last week reduced to a single abomination that outraged the world.

Donald TrumpGETTY

Donald Trump launched a missile attack against a Syrian airfield

Until Tuesday’s chemical weapons attack on the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhun many had regarded the situation in Syria as too difficult and too remote to fully relate to. 

Yes, we had watched with increasing alarm the desperate scenes unfolding in bombed-out Aleppo but as Western leaders had made clear by their lack of military intervention, this was someone else’s war and someone else’s problem. 

Then came the horrifying images of children contorted in death by the effects of a nerve agent. 

As Syrian father Abdul Hamid al-Yousef cradled in his arms the bodies of his murdered nine-month-old twins, having also lost his wife and 19 other members of his family, the world finally woke up to the fact that such inhumanity cannot be ignored any longer.

US President Donald Trump believed that gassing babies to death crossed a line beyond political rhetoric and international diplomacy. 

His non-interventionist “America first” policy had been trumped by an act so heinous it would have been immoral to do nothing. 

The US missile strike on the airfield from which the gas attack was launched sent Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad a clear message: your days are numbered. 

Having insisted “every single bit” of his WMD stockpile would be destroyed after the 2013 chemical attack on Ghouta, Syria, the tyrannical leader has continued to kill his own people with impunity. 

It took 59 Tomahawk missiles to tell Assad his war crimes will no longer be tolerated. 

In the same decisive stroke Trump’s response made a mockery of President Barrack Obama’s endless wavering while reminding the world, especially Assad’s Russian backers, what it really means to be Commander-in-Chief.

With the disastrous consequences of the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions still playing out it is understandable that many will worry about wading into Syria. 

Look at the refugee crisis. Look at Islamic State. But look at the photographs taken in the aftermath of the gas attack and ask yourself this: how much worse can it get? Britain has a vital role to play in standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the US in pushing for a ceasefire. 


The strike was in retaliation to the barbaric chemical attack against rebel-held Khan Sheikhun

UN resolutions on Syria have long proved useless since they have always been vetoed by Russia. 

So what is needed now is a coalition of Western minds united in the aim of intensifying the political process with a view to finding an end to these appalling atrocities. 

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson was right to abandon his trip to Moscow to instead take the diplomatic lead with the G7 while US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson takes the fight to Russia. 

It is what Britain does best. The Anglo-American meeting of might and minds has brokered peace before and can do so again.