The Syrian opposition said Western strikes on Saturday would not change the course of the seven-year war in Syria, while the Syrian army said it would crush remaining rebel-held parts of the country.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Friday accused Israel of perpetrating a strike on a Syrian air base early last week in which a number of Iranian Revolutionary Guards members were killed, and said that Israel had made a "historic mistake."
"They [the Israelis] have committed a great folly and have put themselves into a direct fight with Iran," Nasrallah said in a televised speech.
The weekend strikes, with missiles launched by the United States, Britain, and France, targeted Syrian President Bashar Assad's chemical weapons stores in response to a deadly poison gas attack near Damascus a week ago, Washington said.
The Pentagon said the strikes targeted three facilities – a scientific research center in the Damascus area, allegedly linked to the production and testing of chemical and biological warfare technology; a chemical weapons storage facility west of Homs; and a chemical weapons equipment storage facility and key command post, also west of Homs.
But rebels and opposition leaders said the Western powers should also hit Assad's conventional weapons, which have killed many more people during the war.
Some insurgent officials said they feared an onslaught against the rebel bastion in Idlib, which a senior Iranian official has indicated could be the next target.
"Maybe the regime will not use chemical weapons again, but it will not hesitate to use weapons," opposition leader Nasr al-Hariri said.
A rebel fighter said he was bracing for further attacks as "revenge" by the government and its allies on rebel territory in the northwest, including the Idlib region.
"More was expected from the American strike to affect the path of the war and to curb Assad's crimes," he told Reuters from Hama province.
The Pentagon said it believed the airstrikes "attacked the heart of the Syrian chemical weapons program," significantly degrading Syria's ability to use such weapons again. Russian officials said the damage was minimal, maintaining that all key air bases were intact and the purported chemical weapons facilities had been abandoned long ago.
Capt. Adulsalam Abdulrazek, a former officer in Syria's chemical program, said the overnight strikes probably hit "parts of, but not the heart" of the operation.
Abdulrazek said there were an estimated 50 warehouses storing chemical weapons before the program was dismantled in 2013. He said he believed those fixed storage facilities, mostly in rural areas, are intact or only slightly dispersed, and that the program was only partly dismantled because Damascus refused to allow inspections.
IHS Jane's expert Karl Dewey, said the scientific research facility on the northeastern edge of Damascus is thought to have integrated chemical payloads onto artillery.
Damascus and its allies have said reports last week suggesting that Assad's government unleashed deadly poison gas on civilians in the rebel-held town of Douma, killing dozens, were fabricated as a pretext for Western strikes.
After the suspected gas attack, rebels in Douma finally surrendered the town. This clinched a big victory for Assad, wiping out the last insurgent pocket in the eastern Ghouta region, near the capital.
The war has been going Assad's way since Russia intervened in his defense in 2015. From holding less than one-fifth of Syria in 2015, Assad has recovered control over the largest chunk of the country with Russian and Iranian help.
Mohamad Alloush, political chief of the Army of Islam faction that had controlled Douma, said the Western strikes on Saturday would not be enough.
"As long as this regime and its security agencies exist, the chemical [attacks] will continue because there is safety from the consequences that would end it," he said.
"And [Assad] is portraying what happened as a victory," he added.
The Syrian presidency posted a video appearing to show Assad arriving for work on Saturday morning, a few hours after the U.S.-led attack, dressed in a suit and tie and carrying a briefcase.
Though swathes of Syria remain beyond his grasp, the insurgency currently poses no military threat to his rule.
The opposition has praised U.S. President Donald Trump for taking action against Assad after criticizing his predecessor, former U.S. President Barack Obama, for failing to enforce his own red line when Assad used poison gas on civilians in 2013.
But they want more. "The strike has weakened the regime, but has not strengthened the opposition," said another rebel commander.
Trump last year decided to halt a CIA program that had funneled weapons and cash to some Free Syrian Army rebels.
The bigger challenge for Assad will be rebel territory at the frontiers with Turkey, Jordan and Israel, and the swathe of eastern and northern Syria which Kurdish-led militias control with support from the United States.
Ali Akbar Velayati, a top adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on a visit to Damascus this week, said he hoped Syria and its allies would soon drive U.S. troops from the country. He also said he hoped the rebels would be driven out of the city of Idlib in northwestern Syria very soon.
The Syrian army said air defense systems brought down most of the U.S., British and French missiles.
"Such attacks will not deter our armed forces and allied forces from persisting to crush what is left of the armed terrorist groups," the Syrian military said.
Syria's foreign ministry said the Western strikes would only "lead to inflaming tensions in the world" and threaten international security.
"The barbaric aggression… will not affect in any way the determination and insistence of the Syrian people and their heroic armed forces," state media said, citing a ministry source.
Khamenei said the U.S.-led airstrikes early Saturday were "a crime" that would bring no benefit.
"I clearly declare that the president of the United States, the president of France and the British prime minister are criminals," Khamenei said in a speech, according to his Twitter account.
"They will not benefit [from the attack] in the same way they went to Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan in the past years and committed such crimes and did not gain any benefits," Khamenei added.
Shiite militias backed by Tehran have helped Assad's army stem rebel advances and, following Russia's entry into the war in 2015, turn the tide decisively in the Syrian government's favor.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani warned that the U.S.-led missile attacks would lead to further destruction in the Middle East, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported.
"Such attacks will have no result but more destruction … the Americans want to justify their presence in the region by such attacks," Rouhani was quoted as saying, signaling that Iran's support for Assad would grow stronger.
An official in Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Islamic republic's most powerful military arm, said fallout from the attacks would ultimately harm Washington.
"With this attack … the situation will become more complex, and this will surely be at the expense of the United States, which will be responsible for the aftermath of upcoming regional events that will certainly not be in their interest," Yadollah Javani, the Guards' deputy head for political affairs, told Fars news agency.
"The resistance front will be strengthened and it will have more capacity to act against [U.S.] acts of intervention. Americans should expect the consequences of their actions," Javani said.
Iran often refers to regional countries and forces opposed to Israel and the United States as a "resistance front."
In a statement, the IRGC said: "This unrelenting confrontation shows that the Syrian people, with the support of the strategic allies of Damascus, will not stop until achieving complete victory," Fars reported.
Iran's military chief of staff General Mohammad Baqeri assured Syrian Defense Minister Ali Abdullah Ayoub of Tehran's continued support.
"The nation and the armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran will continue to fight alongside the Syrian people and the Syrian armed forces against the criminal terrorists," Fars quoted Baqeri as telling Ayoub by telephone.
Earlier, the Foreign Ministry in Tehran said Washington and its allies had attacked Syria "despite the absence of any proven evidence."
"Iran is opposed to the use of chemical weapons on the basis of religious, legal and ethical standards, while at the same time it … strongly condemns [using this] as an excuse to commit aggression against a sovereign state," it said in a statement carried by state media.
Analyst Hossein Sheikholeslam, a former Iranian ambassador to Damascus, told state television the attacks would bolster support for the Syrian government.
"These attacks will stabilize the Syrian government … and unite the different tribes in Syria as Syrians become aware of their honor and come to the defense of the independence, territorial integrity and the government of their country," he said.
