Story highlights Kenneth Roth: Trump's one-day emotional response to horrors of a particular chemical attack in Syria is not enough

He says the US needs a coherent policy to end the Syrian people's suffering

Kenneth Roth is executive director of Human Rights Watch. Follow him on Twitter: @KenRoth. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.

(CNN) How do we make sense of President Donald Trump's military response to the April 4 sarin attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun, which evidence shows was launched by Syrian government forces?

Kenneth Roth

Was Trump simply demonstrating that he is not President Barack Obama, responding militarily to the chemical weapon "red line" that Obama chose instead to enforce through the negotiated removal of what President Bashar al-Assad claimed were all of his chemical weapons? Or was Trump showing that even he has limits to the atrocities he will tolerate?

Russia claims that the April 4 attack was a Syrian conventional bomb that happened to hit a "terrorist" chemical weapons cache on the ground. That cover story was quickly undercut by the fact that Khan Sheikhoun residents began suffering symptoms from a sarin attack five hours before Russia said the conventional attack took place.

Then, last week, Human Rights Watch decimated the cover story. Dozens of local residents interviewed said that a crater in the middle of a paved road appeared to have been the epicenter of the chemical exposure and that there were no indications that other sites attacked that morning contained any stored chemicals.

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Two remnants found in a crater in the paved road have characteristics that are similar to a Soviet-produced, air-dropped chemical bomb designed to deliver sarin, suggesting that the weapon used was factory-produced.

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