LIVE: US pounds Syrian airbase after chemical attack

Russia's military on Friday said a US strike on a government air base in Syria was ineffective but announced Syrian air defences would be strengthened to shield the country's key infrastructure.

"To protect Syria's most sensitive infrastructure, a complex of measures will be implemented in the near future to strengthen and improve the effectiveness of the Syrian armed forces' air defence system," defence ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said in a statement.

He added the strike had had an "extremely low" military impact, and fewer than half of the 59 reported US missiles had actually found their target.

"Only 23 missiles reached the Syrian airbase," he said.

The strike on the Shayrat airbase, ordered by US President Donald Trump, destroyed six planes under repair and several buildings, including a storage depot and radio station, he said.

"The runway, taxi ways and Syrian airforce planes at parking spaces are not damaged," he said. 

"The military effectiveness of the massive US missile strike on the Syrian airbase is therefore extremely low."

Separately, the Russian state channel Rossiya24, in a report from the base, said nine planes, as well as munition and fuel depots, had been destroyed but the facility's runway was intact.

Konashenkov's statement said the attack was a "gross violation" of a US-Russian memorandum aimed at avoiding clashes over Syria.

Moscow announced earlier it was halting the deal reached in 2015 in response to the strike, despite Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirming the US side had warned Russia of the impending attack through the channels it had established. 

Trump ordered the strike - Washington's first direct military action against President Bashar Assad's government - in response to what he called a "barbaric" chemical attack this week that he blamed on Damascus.  

Moscow has been flying a bombing campaign in support of Syrian  forces since September 2015 and has sought to deflect blame from its ally over the alleged chemical attack.

The situation in Syria "amounts to an international armed conflict" following US missile strikes on a Syrian airbase, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) told Reuters on Friday.

The United States fired cruise missiles at a base from which President Donald Trump said a deadly chemical weapons attack had been launched on Tuesday, the first direct US assault on the government of Bashar al-Assad in six years of civil war.

"Any military operation by a state on the territory of another without the consent of the other amounts to an international armed conflict," ICRC spokeswoman Iolanda Jaquemet told Reuters in Geneva in response to a query.

"So according to available information - the US attack on Syrian military infrastructure - the situation amounts to an international armed conflict."

Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah said on Friday a US cruise missile strike on a Syrian airbase was an "idiotic step" which would lead to "great and dangerous tensions" in the Middle East.

Hezbollah, which supports Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the six-year-old conflict, said in a statement the strike would not demoralise the Syrian army or negatively affect its allies.

The US military action was a "service" to Israel and its "ambitions in the region," Hezbollah added, without elaborating.

A statement from the Free Syrian Army (FSA) has welcomed the action carried out in Syria by Trump:

"The FSA welcomes the military action that the US carried out over the Sha'iraat military airport, where the Assad regime's carried out its chemical attacks over Khan Shaikhoon with the support of Assad's allies. We consider this move the first step in the correct direction.

"The various Syrian rebel groups consider this a point of change in the international war on terror. Standing up to the terrorism of Bashar al-Assad and his allies, including sectarian militias, represents a successful political step in the war on terror."

A US missile strike on an airbase in central Syria early on Friday was "foolish and irresponsible," President Bashar al-Assad's office said.

"What America did is nothing but foolish and irresponsible behaviour, which only reveals its short-sightedness and political and military blindness to reality."

"This aggression has increased Syria's resolve to hit those terrorist agents, to continue to crush them, and to raise the pace of action to that end wherever they area," a statement from the presidency said.

He denied that his government had carried out a chemical attack this week and said that Washington was "naively pulled behind a false propaganda campaign".

The United States fired cruise missiles on Friday at a Syrian airbase from which President Donald Trump said a deadly chemical weapons attack had been launched, the first direct U.S. assault on the government of Bashar al-Assad in six years of civil war.

In the biggest foreign policy decision of his presidency so far, Trump ordered the step his predecessor Barack Obama never took: directly targetting Assad's military as punishment for the chemical weapons attack which killed at least 70 people.

That catapulted the United States into a confrontation with Russia, which has military advisers on the ground assisting its close ally Assad.

"Years of previous attempts at changing Assad’s behaviour 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.

"Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack," he said of Tuesday's chemical weapons strike, which Western countries blame on Assad's forces. "No child of God should ever suffer such horror."

The swift action is likely to be interpreted not only as a signal to Russia, but also to other countries such as North Korea, China and Iran where Trump has faced foreign policy tests early in his presidency.

Frederic C Hof, previously the special coordinator for regional affairs in the US State Department's Office of the Special Envoy for Middle East Peace, has written that the US strikes in Syria could finally put a break on Assad's war in the country:

"If the battle against violent extremism is serious, the United States should be prepared to obstruct, complicate, and frustrate Assad’s free ride for mass homicide. Ideally, Russia will cooperate in getting its client out of this bloody business.

"Whether it does or not, however, the Trump administration must act on what it already knows: that Bashar al-Assad’s political survival strategy of collective punishment and mass homicide is a gift that keeps on giving to ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other forms of violent, terrorist extremism.

"If the strikes of 6 April 2017 end the Assad crime wave against Syrian civilians, good. If they do not, further action will be essential. “Never again” must not become “Well, maybe just this once.” Civilian protection aside, resisting mass murder in Syria - irrespective of the murder weapon - is an essential tool in countering and defeating violent extremism."

Hof in 2015 wrote of his regret about his time in office and how he badly miscalculated the situation in Syria.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad bears "sole responsibility" for the US strike on a Syrian airbase, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande said in a joint statement on Friday.

"After the chemical weapons massacre of April 4 on Khan Sheikhun in northwestern Syria, a military installation of the Syrian regime was destroyed by a US air strike last night," the statement, issued after a morning phone call, said. 

"President Assad bears sole responsibility for this development."

"His repeated use of chemical weapons and his crimes against his own people call for sanctions, which France and Germany already demanded in the summer of 2013 after the massacre of Ghouta," the site of another chemical weapons attack that killed hundreds.

They added that "France and Germany, together with their partners and within the framework of the United Nations, will continue their efforts to hold President Assad responsible for his criminal deeds".

Berlin and Paris "jointly call on the international community to join forces for a political transition in Syria in accordance with United Nations Security Council Resolution 2254 and the Geneva Communique," they said, referring to a statement issued on June 30 2012 by the UN-backed Action Group for Syria.

Merkel and Hollande were each informed "one to two hours before the strikes," a source close to the French president's office said. 

German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel earlier said the strike was "understandable" after the UN Security Council was "unable to clearly and unequivocally respond to the barbaric use of chemical weapons against innocent people in Syria".

His French counterpart Jean-Marc Ayrault, with Gabriel on a trip to Mali, said he hoped the strikes would show Syria's allies Russia and Iran that they should withdraw their support for Assad.

"The Russians and the Iranians must now understand that they cannot prop up Bashar al-Assad's regime... it cannot go on, it makes no sense," Ayrault told France Info radio.

Moscow suspended a bilateral agreement with Washington designed to avoid clashes in the skies over Syria on Friday, in response to America's decision to strike a Syrian government airbase. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the US of breaking international law in wake of the strike, adding that they have seriously hurt US-Russia relations, added the Kremlin.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday he hoped US missile strikes on Syria would not irreparably damage relations between Moscow and Washington.

"This is an act of aggression, on an absolutely made-up pretext," Lavrov told a news conference in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. "It reminds me of the situation in 2003 when the United States and Britain, along with some of their allies, attacked Iraq."

Syrian state TV has confirmed that nine civilians, including four children, were killed from this morning's US air strike on a government airbase, AFP reported. 

The Russian ministry of defence has also confirmed that 23 out of the 59 Tomahawk missiles fired by the US hit the Syrian airfield and that the runway remains undamaged.