Smacking Assad and Putin upside their heads, and that’s what it was, does nothing to inhibit their continued actions against the Islamic State, while serving as a reminder that the US is back in the game.
You can look at the US (limited) strike on Assad as a precursor to the dropping of the MOAB.
Bashar al-Assad still has ‘hundreds of tonnes’ of chemicals stockpiled, former Syrian weapons research chief claims
President Bashar al-Assad continues to retain hundreds of tonnes of his country’s chemical stockpile after deceiving United Nations inspectors sent in to dismantle it, according to Syria’s former chemical weapons research chief and other experts.
Brigadier-General Zaher al-Sakat – who served as head of chemical warfare in the powerful 5th Division of the military until he defected in 2013 – told The Telegraph that Assad’s regime failed to declare large amounts of sarin precursor chemicals and other toxic materials.
Syria handed over what it said was its entire chemical arsenal to the UN’s Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in 2014 under a deal negotiated by the US and Russia after hundreds of people were killed in a sarin gas attack in the outskirts of the capital, Damascus.