The United States dropped more than 20,000 pounds of explosive devices on Syria on Sunday, marking a sharp increase in the number of bombs dropped since last week’s attack on the United States.
The White House said that, as of Sunday, the United Nations has said more than 1,000 civilians have been killed in Syria since the deadly attack on Friday.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Sunday that he believes the attacks were meant to target Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government and to “make the world more secure.”
He said the United Nation and the United State were “not going to take the chance of the international community being taken for fools,” and that the United Kingdom and France were also conducting bombing raids on the Syrian military.
“There is no doubt about it,” Kerry said.
“The regime’s use of chemical weapons against its own people is intolerable.
We’ve seen it before.
There’s no doubt that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons.
We don’t have a diplomatic solution, and we have no plan to put a military solution to this.”
He added that the bombing raids “were in response to the barbaric chemical attack on a Syrian airbase that took place a day earlier.”
Kerry also said the Obama administration is working with its allies in Europe and the Middle East to find a diplomatic path to ending the conflict in Syria.
“We’re going to work to find the right diplomatic solution to ending this conflict,” Kerry told reporters on Sunday.
“It’s a difficult situation, it’s a complicated situation, and it has a very high risk of escalation, but it has to end, and there is no path to that end that I can see.”
The United Nations says about 200,000 people have been injured and more than 10,000 have died in Syria’s civil war, and the death toll could rise as more victims are identified.
The attacks on Syria began on Sunday when two missiles fired by the Syrian army on a U.N. facility near Damascus exploded.
U,S.
officials say that it was a response to a chemical weapons attack on civilians in Khan Sheikhoun that killed more than 80 people on Aug. 21.
A day later, Syrian President Bashir al-Abadi called for an end to the fighting, saying it was “the height of cynicism” to blame the U.s. and Russia for the attack.
On Sunday, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused Washington of trying to use the incident as a pretext to expand the war.
“In Syria, the U of A, the State Department, the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs, all the political powers, all international powers are involved in this [campaign] against the Syrian regime,” Putin said during a televised interview with German broadcaster ARD.
“They’re working to achieve regime change in Syria by any means possible.”
The U.K. said Sunday it was also sending troops to Syria, but did not specify where.
Britain is a member of the U,N.
Security Council.
The U.,N. “
This is about ending this war and the killing of civilians in Syria and ensuring that we can live in a free and secure world,” he said.
The U.,N.
is investigating the Aug. 1 attack on Khan Sheikhun, and Kerry said Saturday that the U.,S.
and France are working to determine what happened there.
“These strikes were a response by President Assad to an attack on his military command center in the Khan Sheikhouy area,” Kerry added.
The strikes targeted the command center, which is part of the headquarters of the Syrian Arab Army, and destroyed the military base.
Kerry told CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday that the attacks “had a terrible impact” on the U..
S. ally in the region.
“At this time, we have an assessment of the results of that strike, and they were devastating,” Kerry responded.
“As you know, in Syria, we’ve seen a number of attacks in recent days.
We have an obligation to do everything possible to ensure that we do not see an escalation of the situation in Syria.”
He also said that while the United Arab Emirates was involved in bombing raids in the area, “we’re not going to have the chance to go and talk to them because they’ve got other things to do.”
Kerry told CNN that the White House was “very confident” in the U.-S.
response to Syria.
The Pentagon said the strikes on Syria were “appropriate” and that its “coordination with the United-Kurdish coalition is the right way forward” for the U-S.
to combat terrorism.
“Our partners in the coalition will continue to make sure that they do what’s required to keep the peace and to prevent terrorist groups from taking advantage of this situation to commit heinous crimes,” said
