The United States fired cruise missiles on Friday at a Syrian airbase from which it said a deadly chemical weapons attack had been launched this week, the first direct US assault on the government of Bashar al-Assad in six years of civil war.
US President Donald Trump ordered the step his predecessor Barack Obama never took: directly targetting Assad's military with air strikes in punishment for the chemical weapons attack, which killed at least 70 people, many of them children.
That catapulted the United States into a confrontation with Russia, which has military advisers on the ground assisting its close ally Assad.
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