The past 48 hours of big Syria news, explained

Syria used chemical weapons against its own citizens, killing at least 42 adults and children. President Donald Trump threatened a military response in a tweet, vowing that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad would pay a “big price.” Israeli jets bombed a Syrian government base in northern Homs province for reasons that still are not yet fully clear.

And all of that took place over just 48 hours. And an American strike — Trump’s “big price” — could still be forthcoming.

New National Security Adviser John Bolton, a well-known uberhawk, started his job on Monday morning just before an 11:30 am Cabinet meeting. President Trump has vowed to make a decision on whether to use force in the next 24 to 48 hours, even calling out Russian President Vladimir Putin by name for his support of Assad. Bolton could be a strong and powerful voice advocating for a US strike.

So there is a lot going on, even by the standards of the exceptionally complicated Syrian conflict. What follows is a guide to what happened this weekend, why the events are so important, and, most importantly, the scary things that could happen next.

The Syrian civil war has been raging since 2011, and with a truly dazzling number of local and international players involved in the fighting. But the central conflict has always been between Bashar al-Assad’s government and a ragtag coalition of anti-Assad rebels — and for the past two and a half years, it’s clear that Assad has been winning.

Recent Russian air support, paired with longstanding on-the-ground interventions by Iranian and proxy militia forces, are the main reasons why. Since the beginning of the Russian intervention in September 2015, Assad has steadily retaken territory; major rebel strongholds, like the city of Aleppo, have fallen to regime forces. “Assad won his war to stay in power,” Mara Karlin, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, concluded in February congressional testimony.

A central part of the Assad-Russia-Iran strategy has been deliberate punishment of civilian population centers in order to sap rebels and their civilian supporters of their will to fight. Jennifer Cafarella, an expert at the Institute for the Study of War, described the strategy as “siege, starve, and surrender” in a February interview with Vox. Assad has deployed chemical weapons, which are an especially spectacular and cruel way of killing people, as part of this campaign of terror.

What makes this weekend’s strike on Douma, a suburb of the Syrian capital of Damascus, different is its scale of the attack. Assad has used various kinds of chemical weapons dozens of times; most attacks are met with a collective shrug by the international community. But large-scale deployment of such weapons against civilian-populated areas have twice provoked threats of war from the United States; once in 2013 and again last April.

In 2013, President Barack Obama threatened to intervene in the conflict after Syria crossed his “red line” of chemical weapons use. He backed down from his threats after Syria agreed to a Russian-brokered effort to eliminate its chemical weapons stockpile — an agreement whose implementation has clearly been less than complete.

In April 2017, President Trump launched cruise missiles at a Syrian airbase after a chemical weapons attack in the town of Khan Sheikhoun killed more than 80 people. The goal was both to punish Assad and to send a signal that any future chemical attacks would be met with force from the US. Clearly, that didn’t work as planned either.

So now we’re in a situation where the United States either launches another round of strikes or risks looking like a paper tiger when it comes to Assad’s continued use of chemical weapons.

A grim irony is that provoking this crisis probably wasn’t very smart on Assad’s part. He almost certainly would have retaken Douma without using chemical weapons, and could likely have killed the same number of civilians with standard bombs without any kind of international uproar. Now, one of the very few things that could pose a serious threat to Assad at this point — American intervention — is back on the table.

“The Russians and Iranians are probably pissed at Assad for using chemical weapons again,” says Ilan Goldenberg, director of the Middle East Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.

The Sunday airstrike on T4, a Syrian military base in the western Homs province, initially seemed like the promised US response. That morning, President Trump had threatened Syria with retaliation, and them a major airbase was hit. Syrian government news said it was “American aggression”:

But it turned out that this wasn’t correct. The Department of Defense denied responsibility; both Russian and American sources said the jets bombing T4 were Israeli, not American. The Israeli government has not explained the rationale for its attack, or even confirmed on the record that it was responsible, but at this point, it’s fair to say they did it.

At first blush, it might seem that Israel was doing America’s dirty work, bombing Assad so the US didn’t have to. But experts on Israel and the Syrian conflict widely dismissed the theory, suggesting that Israel likely had its own motives to attack at this time.

Israel has bombed Syrian targets fairly frequently over the course of the war. The reason for such strikes is pretty much always Israeli national security concerns; Iran and its proxy Hezbollah, a Lebanese militant group currently fighting on Assad’s behalf in Syria, are major threats to Israeli security. When Israel bombs targets in Syria, the target is typically something like an Iranian weapons shipment bound for Hezbollah.

The base that was hit, T4, strengthens this interpretation. We have no reason to believe the base had anything do with the chemical attack in Douma, but it is a known hub for Iranian activity. In February, an Iranian drone controlled by personnel based at T4 crossed over from southern Syria into Israeli airspace, prompting an Israeli bombing raid on the base. There are any number of plausible reasons Israel might have attacked the base again.

“There’s no way of knowing what’s going on at T4. There could have been weapons there,” says Michael Koplow, policy director of the Israel Policy Forum.

The bottom line, then, is that Israel likely attacked Syria for its own reasons. Which means the question of how Trump will respond to the chemical weapons attack — with force or otherwise — is very much on the table.

In comments to the press around midday on Monday, Trump condemned the Syrian chemical weapons attack and at least hinted at a likely military response in the next two days.

“It was atrocious. It was horrible,” he said of the attack. “This is about humanity, and it can’t be allowed to happen.”

This kind of thinking reportedly prompted the strike on Syria last year. Accounts from inside the White House suggest that a photo slideshow showing children who had been poisoned by the attack, put together by Ivanka Trump and then-White House aide Dina Powell, got the president to be emotionally invested in the issue — leading him to order an attack on a Syrian government airfield.

Similar images have been coming out of Douma this time around. And Trump’s foreign policy advisory team, very much including Bolton, is notably hawkish. So it’s very possible — not inevitable, just possible — that there will be some kind of American military response in the coming days.

The question, though, is whether such an attack would make any kind of difference on the ground.

The president has repeatedly stated in recent weeks that he wants to end American involvement in the Syrian civil war. A major escalation — a concerted campaign to do serious harm to Assad’s military capabilities — would be time-consuming and risky. For that reason, experts are skeptical that Trump’s response would all that different from the extremely limited attack on a Syrian airfield he launched last year.

“We may launch some symbolic strikes to try to deter future chemical weapons use,” says Goldenberg. “I really doubt it [will go beyond that]. We still have the Russians, and any major escalation risks escalating with them.”

It’s possible that this time around, such an attack might deter Assad from future large-scale chemical weapons use. Maybe Assad wouldn’t want to risk another, bigger American intervention. But clearly, last year’s strike wasn’t enough to deter Assad. It’s possible that another limited strike would only confirm that the United States will never really punish Assad for using chemical weapons.

What it wouldn’t do, for sure, is change the course of the Syrian civil war. Assad would still likely hold on to power, even if the war drags on for years — killing untold numbers of Syrians in the process.