UK: Hundreds protest Assad regime for chemical attack

Just last week Mr Tillerson said President Assad's future would be "decided by the Syrian people".

It was the first military intervention by the U.S. against the Assad regime during the six-year-old civil war.

A political solution to the war in Syria is not possible with President Bashar al-Assad in power, the USA ambassador to the United Nations has said in an apparent hardening of the Trump administration's position.

"It's important that we keep our priorities straight".

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova however said the visit was cancelled after it had been rescheduled.

Once the threat from Islamic State has been reduced or eliminated, "I think we can turn our attention directly to stabilizing the situation in Syria", Tillerson said in excerpts from an interview on CBS's "Face the Nation", that will air in full on Sunday.

"Assad was losing back in 2013".

Secretary of State-designate Rex Tillerson testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2017, at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

As long as Assad is there, you're going to have a radical jihadist Sunni element, even if you destroy ISIS it'll be al-Nusra and that new coalition.

The reasons the President cites for the use of force - "to degrade the Syrian military's ability to conduct further chemical weapons attacks" and "to dissuade the Syrian regime from using or proliferating chemical weapons, thereby promoting the stability of the region and averting a worsening of the region's current humanitarian catastrophe" - are indeed compelling national security and foreign policy interests.

"How many more chemical massacres?", read one placard. "This has absolutely nothing to do with attempts to find out what happened to the chemical weapons", Zakharov said.

He said the United States expected Russian Federation to take a tougher stance against Syria by rethinking its alliance with Assad because "every time one of these horrific attacks occurs, it draws Russian Federation closer into some level of responsibility". "Assad signed the chemical weapons treaty ban".

Saudi Arabia, one of the most vehement opponents of Assad, said the missile barrage was the right response to "the crimes of this regime to its people in light of the failure of the worldwide community to stop it".

The representative of Russia, Ambassador Vladimir Safronkov, said the consequences of the U.S. strike to global and regional stability could be extremely serious.

The two leaders also called for an objective investigation into an incident involving chemical weapons in Syria's Idlib and said they were ready to deepen cooperation to fight terrorism, the Kremlin said in a statement on its website.

EUROPEAN UNION: EU President Donald Tusk said in a tweet that the "US strikes show needed resolve against barbaric chemical attacks".

"If this intervention is limited only to an air base, if it does not continue and if we don't remove the regime from heading Syria, then this would remain a cosmetic intervention", said Cavusoglu in the southern city of Antalya. The attack was the first direct USA assault on Syria and the government of President Bashar al-Assad in the six-year war there.

On Saturday, one woman was killed in a suspected Russian airstrike on Khan Sheikhoun, the Observatory said.