Russia and Iran issue warning against further US attack on Syria
By
Jordan Shilton
15 April 2017
Responding to the Trump administration’s unilateral and illegal missile strike on Syria April 7, Russia, Iran and Syria issued a blunt warning to Washington against conducting any further attacks Friday.
Meeting in Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his Iranian and Syrian counterparts issued a strongly-worded statement describing the strike as a “flagrant violation” of international law. Further action, it continued, would produce “grave consequences not only for regional but global security.”
As if to underscore the point, the statement came less than 24 hours after the US confirmed it had dropped its largest non-nuclear bomb in Afghanistan in what amounted to a demonstration of Washington’s determination not to be bound by any restrictions in its ruthless pursuit of its global economic and geopolitical dominance.
The horrific weapon was aimed principally at Russia and Iran, and any other power contemplating a challenge to Washington. It followed the trip by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to Moscow, where five hours of talks between him, Lavrov and Russian President Vladimir Putin proved incapable of bridging the sharp tensions between the two countries. Tillerson effectively delivered a US ultimatum, demanding that Russia cease its support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and emphasized the US commitment to regime change in Damascus. The secretary of state remarked afterwards that US-Russian relations were at a “low point,” while Trump, hosting NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in Washington, acknowledged that Washington and Moscow were not getting along.
Although the US military claimed that the MOAB had killed a total of 36…