VIDEO: Footage from Al-Shayrat Airbase, Syria and the aftermath
by Sophie Mangal, Syria Media Center
edited April 8 to add working video link
On April 7, between 3.42am and 3.56am, a massive rocket attack was carried out from an area near Crete Island in the Mediterranean Sea. Two destroyers of the US Navy (USS Ross and USS Porter) launched 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at the Syrian Al-Shayrat airbase in Homs Province.
According to various mass media, only 23 of them reached the Syrian airbase.
The strike on the Al-Shayrat airbase in Syria’s Homs Province destroyed a material storage depot, a training facility, a canteen, six Mig-23 aircraft in repair hangars and a radar station.
The runway, taxiways and the Syrian aircraft remain undamaged.
According to the command of the Syrian airbase, two Syrian military personnel were missing, four were killed and six were burned in the firefighting.
The remaining 36 cruise missiles hit the surrounding peaceful settlements.
As a result five civilians including three children were killed in the village of Al-Shayrat located 1.5 km east of the airbase.
Seven citizens were wounded in Al-Manzul (1 km north of the airfield).
Four people including one child were killed in Al-Hamrat (4.5 km south-east of the airfield).
Thus the combat effectiveness of the American massive missile strike against the Syrian airbase proved to be extremely low.
All the accusations of the alleged violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention that were put forward by the U.S. as a justification for the strike are groundless. The statements of the U.S. side about the alleged evidence of the Syrian army using chemical weapons must be confirmed by real facts and presented to the world community. The U.S. has to prove the existence of unquestionable evidence that chemical weapons were used by the Syrian army in Khan Shaykhun.
It is well-known that between 2013 and 2016 the Syrian government fully implemented all measures to eliminate the existing chemical weapons as well as their delivery means and their production basis. All the stocks were destroyed.
The components for the production of chemical weapons were removed from the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic and then destroyed at enterprises in the U.S., Finland, Great Britain and Germany.
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I doubt that civilians areas would have been hit in this attack because the target is a military base. Tomohawks are not fire and hope weapons. They are accurate enough to hit a specific corner of a building.
So this sounds like Surian propaganda. Obviously they’ll want to claim this attack was a failure but that also sends a bad signal. If America feels Assad isn’t getting the message that’s inviting further responses.
Apologies for spelling…
There are reliable reports that nearly half of the 60 missiles fired landed in civilian areas, killing and injuring several people, including children. If their accuracy is as you describe, this can only mean that those areas were deliberately targeted. We can then only feel disgust at Trump’s hypocritical, hand-wringing remarks about “poor little babies”.
Or the ‘Block IV’ Tomahawk is a worthless piece of junk, which was downed by superior ECMs (Electronic Counter Measures.) In a perverse way, the Americans may have got what they long wanted – an NFZ. That is, at least for their Tomahawks. There are 36 carcasses of Tomahawks currently on their way to Russian/Syrian/Iranian and Chinese labs – to be reverse engineered to find their vulnerabilities. These can be relayed to the S-400, and other air defense systems. Raytheon will then get the $?bn no-bid contract to upgrade to the Block V Tomahawk. On top of the $2bn already requested by the DoD to supply 4,000 units. Isn’t that how you justify an extra $54bn in ‘defence’ spending, when you are already spending around $1.5bn a day on ‘defence’? [P.S. – whatever you do, don’t look at the rest of the economy, it’s about to tank!] http://money.cnn.com/2017/04/07/investing/syria-raytheon-tomahawk-missiles/index.html If only… Read more »
Yes. The low level efficiency of the saturation strike suggests only a few possibilities:
A) Russian ECMs
B) Deliberate mistargeting (either by an insubordinate rank and file or ordered from on high for any number of ‘political’ reasons (as for example: ‘the crying need for more money to fix what was a demonstrable failure’ or ‘to telegraph to the warmongers in Washington how unprepared the U.S. military is to confront Russia’)
C) The guidance system of the existing stock of Tomahawks is unreliable junk (in which case, the ‘political’ implications underscored in ‘B)’ would hold as a matter of course and necessity)
” Isn’t that how you justify an extra $54bn in ‘defence’ spending, when you are already spending around $1.5bn a day on ‘defence’?”
Yes. I think you got that exactly right.
$1.5m to liberate some turnips: http://russia-insider.com/en/overpriced-us-missile-lands-syrian-guys-garden/ri19484
Seems like a reasonable price to pay! 🙂
Regardless of whether civilian areas have been hit or not, the US have no right to be in Syria let alone bombing their military. Further aiding the terrorists destroying Syrian lives.
Soldiers are also still people with family. I know we’re reminded of that when it comes to western soldiers.
My dream is that one day all of you “divided and conquered” “buffoons”, will let it sink in to your stubborn heads that all of this type of warfare became a reality very soon after the creation of the US Federal Reserve which is classed as a privately owned bank and not actually a federal bank in the way that its title suggests. The so called “cold war” was a hoax which was designed to makes lots of money for the military industrial complex. And boy oh boy did it make loads of money out of the hoax! And much of it was made making a certain type of weapons that are a scientifically impossibility…But none the less, those extortionately priced fake weapons sit idly by in our leader’s knowledge that they are useless as destructive weapons, but are in fact extremely good at “scaring the shit out of” the… Read more »
The so called “cold war” was a hoax which was designed to makes lots of money for the military industrial complex. And boy oh boy did it make loads of money out of the hoax! And much of it was made making a certain type of weapons that are a scientifically impossibility…
Tell that to the survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, [edited for ad hominem – Admin]
ad hominem
It’s impermissible to insult somebody who claims that Japanese people are too stupid to realize that the weapons which incinerated two of their cities, along with their inhabitants, were nothing out of the ordinary?
Well done for spotting that I was taking about so called: “nuclear weapons”, but your comment: “Tell that to the survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki” suggests that you believe in that particular “industrial complex” hoax/ripoff.
If you are that confident in your belief that nuclear weapons really do exist and are able to prove that they do, then here is an opportunity for you to earn yourself one million Euros:
Pt 1 http://heiwaco.tripod.com/bomb.htm
Pt 2 http://heiwaco.tripod.com/bomb1.htm
There appear to be two possibilities:
(a) the Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors are all idiots.
(b) you are an idiot.
I know what my guess is.
I think the US will never provide definitive proof in cases like this even if, hypothetically speaking, they have it. Why? Because if they provide genuine proof even once they will be expected to provide it always. That is the last thing they want given that they have been caught lying and presenting bogus evidence before and it is highly unlikely they have genuine proof of all the acts they try to pin on their enemies du jour. Besides, the western public is so passive it pretty much accepts any and all “explanations”, no proof required. The “fall” of Aleppo is a good example. There is not a shred of evidence supporting the panicked claims that the SAA and Hezbolllah carried out massacres of of civilians. Yet the public generally believes “Assad’s army” are bloodthirsty child killers and the “rebels” are principled “freedom fighters”. I am not quite sure what… Read more »
“I am not quite sure what exactly those calling for the Americans to provide evidence are expecting.” I don’t think any reasonable person expects to ever convince the American establishment or any other criminal mafia-like organisation to mend its ways and begin to actually justify its violence with genuine instances of crimes that are both being committed by their intended victims and crying out for a kind of retributive justice. Rather, the call for “evidence” is a gesture unmasking the false justifications used by the criminals in high place to persuade their subaltern populations that the slaughters in which they are being forced to participate, directly or indirectly, as soldiers or otherwise, are both necessary and just. The point is to demonstrate to the military rank and file, to the war-crazed population, to would be soldiers, that under capitalism, war can only serve one and only one purpose, namely, to… Read more »
That makes sense, and I agree. I was going with the assumption that the challenge against American justifications for war would never be seen or heard by the mass media consuming public but perhaps that was too self-limiting. I do not doubt that if the propagandized masses could be brought to consider points of view not covered by the media – and learn how to think logically about geopolitics – the reaction would be very different than what it is today. If they “woke up” and saw that the evidence was flimsy or non-existent that would have an impact, although the Americans and their sycophants could produce fake evidence like they did before the Iraq invasion. The core problem faced by left-leaning resistance is how to influence people to break free of the media shackles and face truths that are very frightening to people who have believed and trusted the… Read more »
“The core problem faced by left-leaning resistance is how to influence people to break free of the media shackles and face truths that are very frightening to people who have believed and trusted the system and its leaders.” Yes. That is a big part of the problem. In addition to this problem of the incessant saturation barrage of the corporate media, however, the task also involves transforming social relations that are inscribed into the very patterns of people’s daily lives, rooted in their habits and motivations and ways of feeling and thinking, patterns of existence that are cultural and therefore as second nature to the individual and the entire collective, and compounding even that, these enculturated (reflexive or quasi-instinctual) relations are overseen and managed and enforced by the state, by means of the courts and the police and, as a last resort, the military, to say nothing at all of… Read more »
If they had any evidence, you can be sure they’d produce it.
Why do you think they went to such lengths to concoct “evidence” on which they justified to the public their bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and their invasion of Iraq a few years later?
Yes, if the evidence can be used to justify their criminal designs, your can be sure that it will be amplified and played up in any way it can be. If not, it is forcibly suppressed or ignored, and when it can’t be ignored, it is denigrated as the ravings of deranged “conspiracy theorists.”
I am not so sure they would produce proof if they had it. Because they know they do not have evidence to back up the accusations they make against the bogeymen of the hour, actual evidence, if they had it, would up the standard of proof they would be expected to provide and that would work against them. They concocted evidence before invading Iraq because they thought it helped make their case with the American public. Today, that episode has already been forgotten by most people. And with mass media produced pro-establishment propaganda saturating the mediascape truth is easily brushed aside. Take the “fall” of Aleppo for example. Despite very credible evidence to the contrary being produced, the majority of westerners still believe the SAA and Hezbollah massacred civilians and that the “rebels” are fighting for liberal democracy. They believe that NATO bombing is “humanitarian” and that Russian and Syrian… Read more »
The unprovoked attack contravenes international law and is therefore a war crime. Even if the alleged chemical attack had been carried out by Syrian government forces – for which there is no evidence and no plausible reason – the US attack would still be a war crime. The contempt shown by the US and its allies – especially the UK – for international law is sickening, as is the behaviour of the UN. One longs for these crimes to be punished.
@paulcarline: whilst morally and in essence you are absolutely correct, and these crimes should be punishable; the US (and Israel) have (consciously) opted out of many of the conventions of International Law; they do not recognise the major instrument for the prosecution of International Law – the ICC; and the American Service Members Protection Act 2002 pretty much grants sovereign immunity to their military and political actors.
They are an empire now; and they have granted themselves permission to act as they please; unfettered by any moral, ethical or international convention – because might is right and they are guided by a divine and exceptional ‘Manifest Destiny’.
If, on the other hand, a designated enemy should cross (many) red lines – they are to be punished by the full force of their (divinely guided) military; sanctioned by the UN; and prosecuted by International Law. Hypocrisy writ large.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Protection_Act
“Syrian Tonkin Gulf – Trumpillary”: https://wipokuli.wordpress.com/2017/04/07/syrian-tonking-gulf-trumpillary-der-syrische-tonkin-golf/
regards
Hello,
you say the link to the video is: https://www.google.com/gmail/about/#inbox/15b4a11c827dc4b5?projector=1
is that correct?
My apologies about that. Our site doesn’t accept certain types of files, which is why the link. I’m in contact with the author of this article and hope to receive an accurate URL soon. Will update the link the moment I have the correct URL.
Here’s video footage of the aftermath of the Tomahawk cruise missile strikes taken by a Russian Ministry of Defense drone and uploaded to Youtube on the Russia Insider channel:
Here’s a presentation by a Russian Ministry of Defense spokesman:
daylight video of damage to Al-Shayrat airbase, shot from a drone: