Sydney — Iran and Russia condemned a US strike on a Syrian airbase on Friday as the UK, France and Australia gave their support to the US. Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull described the strike as a "proportionate and calibrated response" to the use of chemical weapons. US President Donald Trump ordered missile strikes against a Syrian airfield from which a deadly chemical weapons attack was launched, declaring that he acted in the US’s "vital national security interest". In a sharp escalation of the US military role in Syria, two US warships fired dozens of cruise missiles from the eastern Mediterranean Sea at the airbase controlled by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in response to the poison gas attack in a rebel-held area on Tuesday, US officials said. Iran denounced the strike, the students news agency ISNA quoted a foreign ministry spokesman as saying.
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