Just hours before the first rays of dawn could awake the citizens of Damascus calling them to work or morning prayer, a volley of American, British and French cruise missiles streaked across the sky and billowed up smoke from a suspected chemical weapons research facility just outside the capital.

The coordinated, multi-national attack, which took at least a week of intense planning to set up, took less than two minutes to carry out. In that time, 105 rockets crashed into three predetermined targets in Syria, including the research facility near Damascus and two suspected storage facilities outside of the northern city of Homs.

The advanced missiles, costing around 100 million dollar in total, were launched from warships and submarines located in the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, as well as from American B-1 bombers, likely over Jordanian airspace.

The results indicated a successful precision strike taking out all three targets and with no reports of civilian casualties. Regarding the attacks, President Trump tweeted at 8:21 a.m. on April 14, “Mission accomplished.”

Russia condemned these  attacks in response, and state media had reported that multiple cruise missiles had either been shot down or failed to explode. This is a fact that the Pentagon has yet to confirm or deny.

Despite fiercely denying the validity of alleged chemical weapons attacks on Syrian citizens in Douma on April 7 to the UN, neither Russian nor Syrian forces have launched any sort of counter-attack against coalition forces.

Many military experts are conflicted on the effectiveness of the strike on disabling Syrian President Bashar-al Assad’s chemical weapons program. The long-term impacts of the coalition military action greatly depends on what was actually inside the chemical research and storage facilities at the time they were destroyed.

If any irreplaceable equipment was destroyed or any scientific personnel were killed  in the strike, then Assad’s chemical weapons program could be set back months or even years.

Experts are generally unsure however because all they can see are the destroyed structure, and it is probable that chemical weapons, technology and personnel either were not in the buildings when they were destroyed, or were spread out in other locations across the country.

At this point, it is simply too difficult to predict what long-term effects the missile strike might have on the complicated situation in the region.