Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal dictatorship has been caught using illegal chemical weapons again.

The Trump administration has charged that the Assad regime was behind a toxic gas attack on Tuesday in the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun in northwestern Syria.

The death toll rose to 72 by Wednesday, including 20 children and 17 women. Videos from the scene showed victims convulsing, choking, and foaming from the mouth, symptoms often manifested by victims of nerve gas attacks.

A sarin gas attack launched by the Assad regime in August 2013 near Damascus killed more than 1,400 people and led President Barack Obama to declare that Assad had violated the “red line” that he had set against the use of chemical weapons.

But the Obama administration backed off after then-Secretary of State John Kerry brokered a last-minute deal with Moscow that called for the destruction of Assad’s chemical weapons stocks.

It has long been clear that the Obama administration accepted that face-saving deal proffered by Russia at a high cost to its own credibility and to U.S. national interests. Assad continued using chemical weapons with impunity. The United Nations and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons found that Syria’s government was responsible for at least three chlorine gas attacks in 2014 and 2015.

In January 2016, the same organization reported that blood samples extracted from victims of one attack indicated they had been exposed to a sarin or sarin-like nerve toxin.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday condemned the attack in a statement:

Today’s chemical attack in Syria against innocent people, including women and children, is reprehensible and cannot be ignored by the civilized world. These heinous actions by the Bashar al-Assad regime are a consequence of the past administration’s weakness and irresolution. President Obama said in 2012 that he would establish a “red line” against the use of chemical weapons and then did nothing. The United States stands with our allies across the globe to condemn this intolerable attack.

This statement is correct as far as it went, but the United States must do more than just condemn the attacks. It must drive up the diplomatic, political, economic, and potential military costs to the Assad regime of using illegal chemical weapons.

This means conducting a thorough investigation of the matter and holding regime officials accountable for any confirmed war crimes. Sanctions should be ratcheted up on the regime to penalize its unacceptable behavior.

Russia has vetoed seven U.N. Security Council resolutions calling for action against the Syrian regime, so the sanctions may need to be devised and applied outside the U.N. framework if Moscow again protects its odious client regime from the consequences of its crimes.

Russia’s diplomatic credibility, which has steadily declined under the duplicitous President Vladimir Putin, has been further undermined by the failure of the 2013 chemical weapons disarmament agreement that Moscow brokered.

Washington should balk at any further diplomatic understandings with Putin on Syria, until he has taken effective action to address the violations of the 2013 agreement. The Trump administration should not repeat its predecessor’s mistake of trusting Russia to enforce agreements.

The Trump administration appropriately has prioritized the military defeat of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, as its highest immediate priority in Syria. But reaching a political settlement to end the civil war and preventing ISIS from resurging are likely to be unreachable goals as long as Assad clings to power.

Although Assad’s departure does not need to be a short-term U.S. priority, it should be a long-term diplomatic priority if the administration expects to defeat ISIS, prevent it from making a comeback, reduce the carnage in Syria, and enable the return of more than 5 million Syrian refugees.

The Trump administration is unlikely to take direct military action against the Assad regime for its chemical attack, just as the Obama administration opted not to retaliate for repeated chemical attacks in 2014-2015.

The potential costs and risks of a direct military response are much higher after Russia’s September 2015 military intervention in Syria.

But the Trump administration can indirectly raise the military costs of Assad’s continued chemical aggression by providing greater aid to select Syrian rebel groups, who have no links to ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other Islamist terrorists or to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party.

The latest chemical attack launched by Assad’s ruthless regime is a reminder that if the Trump administration seeks to eradicate terrorism in Syria, then it cannot ignore the Syrian tyrant, who repeatedly has unleashed one of the most terrifying weapons against his own people. (For more from the author of “Assad Is Using Chemical Weapons. How Trump Can Counter the Barbarism.” please click HERE)

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Pastor Edward Awabdeh has been leading souls to Christ in Syria for over a decade, even through the worst of his country’s catastrophic civil war.

“It’s so painful to see the degree of evil that’s taken place in my country,” Awabdeh says, lamenting what has become of Syria. But his faith has not only grown in response, it has helped him make sense of the disaster.

Awabdeh oversees Alliance Church and around 20 other congregations in Syria, according to a story at the U.K. Express last year, where his congregation has endured not only the horrors of the country’s civil war, but the encroaching presence of ISIS in the region.

When your mission field is a literal warzone and your congregants under constant threat of becoming casualties, carrying out the great commission is a daunting task.

In an interview with Conservative Review, Pastor Awabdeh recalls one week in particular that was exceptionally trying for his flock. During the week leading up to Easter a few years ago, one of the church girls – who was supposed to sing for Palm Sunday – lost both of her feet in a mortar attack on her school, one of the women of the church was killed in a missile attack on an apartment complex, and a son of one of the church’s pastoral team was killed amidst the conflict.

“I felt a very heavy burden … that it was too much to handle,” Awabdeh said, explaining that he also had to go through with the regular Easter services all the while supporting the grieving families affected by loss.

“It was very challenging,” he said. “But when you see people experiencing the help of the Lord and seeing that the Holy Spirit is really filling their hearts with peace, it was really a great encouragement to us. It really empowers us.”

Speaking before the interview at an event on Capitol Hill, Awabdeh told a similar story of a woman in the congregation whose son was killed by Al-Nusra forces, where militants went door to door slaughtering Christian men en masse, in a genocidal attack. He said the mother – whose son willfully and proudly accepted his martyrdom – still doesn’t know where her child is buried.

Another man he knew, Awabdeh says, was killed by Islamists simply because he had a Christian name.

But, for Christians, the Syrian civil war and its impact are just part of a larger pattern of persecution, conflict, and genocide that is steadily driving Christianity out of the region in which it was born. In his speaking engagement on Capitol Hill, hosted by the International Christian Concern, United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, and the House International Religious Freedom Caucus, Awabdeh remarked sadly on Christianity’s desperate and beleaguered situation in the region.

“It seems that each year goes by, more Christians leave the country,” he said. “Century after century, Christians became less and less.”

Times are indeed dark in the pastor’s homeland. But seeing people come to Christ through such indescribable suffering and desolation is what makes the nightmare in his country make sense to him.

“I see that the Lord has allowed this disaster in my country, but that he is using this disaster to bring eternal salvation, eternal fruits [to people],” Awabdeh tells CR. “That helps me — that He has a great project that He is working on … that it is something eternal and that He is using church to be an instrument in this project. This is the most, one singular encouragement of my life.”

Having served as a pastor in Damascus since 2004, Awabdeh said that the decision to stay when war broke out was a natural one for him and his congregation, even as millions of others began to flee the carnage.

“It was not a challenging decision at all, because I am pastoring a church and I am just helping people,” he says, adding that he only thinks about it when he is asked. “So, when things got worse we felt it was just the normal thing to do — the right thing to do.”

“When things got really bad,” Pastor Awabdeh said, “we felt like it was a privilege to be there. We felt that the hand of the Lord was doing something in this country. How blessed are we that we are there to be part of what the Lord is doing in this country? So we thank God for this privilege.”

“It really taught us in a hard way how to be focused on what’s eternal. And I think this lesson was spread in a clear language to everybody among us,” he said, saying that the challenges he and his congregation have endured have taught them to rely on their faith and God completely. “We need Him every minute, every day of our lives.”

He says that when things get especially tough, one portion of scripture that he goes to for support is the second half of Romans 8, which St. Paul wrote to persecuted Christians, laying out the promises and the power of God.

“I feel that’s very comforting, the wonderful promise of Jesus,” Awabdeh says. “I always feel like the sovereignty of God and the love of God are the two wings that carry me through the storm.” (For more from the author of “Why This Pastor Refuses to Leave War-Torn Syria, and Even Considers His Work a Privilege” please click HERE)

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While there were protests in Washington, D.C. on the day of President Trump’s inauguration, Syriac-Assyrians of northern Syria were in a positive mood. Many of them have high hopes that the new president will bring about real change in the war on ISIS, said Johannes de Jong, Director at Christian Political Foundation for Europe.

The reason for their optimism is simple. They see a change in the political party at the White House as a possible opening to partner with a world leader in the war against ISIS. Up until now, only certain ethnic groups fighting ISIS have been provided military support, including training, equipment and weapons. The Syriac Military Council — Christians fighting ISIS — and remaining non-Arab groups wonder why they’ve been left out in the cold by the Obama administration. Now that can all change, thanks to the new president’s election.

Obama’s Racial Preferences in the Middle East

Very early on the morning of January 19, 2017, ISIS terrorists attacked an outpost on the front line of the Syriac Military Council (SMC) near the ISIS capital of Raqqa, Syria. The SMC fighters had no night vision goggles or other equipment that would have allowed them to see ISIS terrorists in the dense morning fog.

Three SMC fighters were killed and three others were injured, de Jong told The Stream. “Sufficient equipment would have made a huge difference,” said de Jong. “It would have spared lives … one of their commanders once personally told me that he would be so happy with just night vision goggles.” With night vision and anti-tank armament, the SMC fighters would have seen the terrorists and killed them before the terrorists reached the SMC outpost, explained de Jong. “[T]he Obama administration never allowed the Pentagon to arm anyone else but … Arabs in the Syrian Democratic Forces.”

The Syrian Democratic Forces is an alliance of multi-ethnic and multi-religion militias fighting jihadist groups. It wasn’t that arming the Arabs was a bad decision, he quickly points out. “The bad decision was not arming the Syriac-Assyrians and Kurds as well.”

Hope for Real Change

The remaining non-Arab people fighting ISIS in Syria hope that President Trump will change the long-standing position of the Obama administration to arm only one ethnic group.

The Democratic Federation of Northern Syria (comprised of three self-governing cantons in northern Syria, much like states in the U.S.) recently elected two co-presidents: Syriac-Assyrian Christian Sanharib Barsom and Kurdish Fawza Youssuf. That the Federation has elected a Syriac-Assyrian Christian and a Kurdish woman to lead a large independent administration of several million people in the heart of the Middle East is an indication of the Federation’s commitment to a multi-ethnic and multi-religion democratic union — one to protect fiercely.

Barsom yesterday appealed to the new U.S. President Trump to support the fighters of the Syriac Military Council and Syriac-Assyrian Christians in the endeavor to fight ISIS:

We urge the US and the new Trump Administration to include the Syriac-Assyrian Christians in the support to the SDF and no longer exclude the Syriac Military Council from support. Equally we emphasise the need to support the Kurds and Arabs in the SDF. We do not understand why Syriac-Assyrian Christians and Kurds are so far excluded from military support. We are all Syrians fighting against ISIS. The European Parliament called to support us already at 12 March 2015. With sufficient support it is for example highly likely that we would not have had so many casualties in the Syriac Military Council last week. We cannot defeat ISIS without more support.

The hope of the Syriac-Assyrian Christians is that the world finally will understand that they have to be treated equally with Kurds and Arabs in political and military terms in both Syria and Iraq in the war against ISIS and the struggle for freedom.

De Jong said that the Obama administration’s decision to only support a part of the SDF had posed a threat to those living in the Middle East and around the globe. “The decision of the previous White House administration of not arming the Syriac-Assyrian Christians and the Kurds not only had serious consequences on the front lines,” said de Jong. “but also resulted in the fact that ISIS is still around and thus was bad for the security of the US and the world.”

Trump’s Pledge

In a brief statement on the White House website, the Trump administration promised to work with other military groups as necessary to defeat ISIS:

Defeating ISIS and other radical Islamic terror groups will be our highest priority. To defeat and destroy these groups, we will pursue aggressive joint and coalition military operations when necessary. In addition, the Trump Administration will work with international partners to cut off funding for terrorist groups, to expand intelligence sharing, and to engage in cyberwarfare to disrupt and disable propaganda and recruiting.

The new White House administration’s official statement and change of political views has excited many Syrians about new possibilities. A Syrian Kurd named Walid Shekhi opened a new restaurant in Kobane and named it “Trump Restaurant,” in honor of the new president. “I believe that the United States under Donald Trump will provide more support to the Kurds to fight,” said Shekhi, “and eventually eliminate the Daesh [ISIS] terrorists.” (For more from the author of “Syrian Fighters Have Newfound Hope Following President Trump’s Election” please click HERE)

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