US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis today pointed toward Russia's role in a suspected poison gas attack on the Syrian rebel-held town of Douma, and said he would not rule out a military response.
Russia was supposed to guarantee the disposal of Syria's stockpile of chemical weapons in September 2013, but President Bashar al-Assad's regime is suspected of conducting repeated gas attacks since then.
"The first thing we have to look at is why are chemical weapons still being used at all when Russia was the framework guarantor of removing all the chemical weapons," Mattis said at the Pentagon in a meeting with his Qatari counterpart.
"Working with our allies and our partners from NATO to Qatar and elsewhere, we are going to address this issue ... I don't rule out anything right now."