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In 2017, US President Donald Trump said he was about to order a military strike against Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad. Only his then defense minister James Mattis opposed this plan, Trump told Fox News.
“I would have preferred to turn it off. I had it until now,” said Assad’s US president. “But Mattis didn’t want to.” At the same time, he called his former defense minister on “Fox & Friends” a “very overrated general.”
With this confession, Trump refuted his own statements about plans to assassinate Assad in 2019. At the time Trump had strongly contradicted a passage from a book by a Washington Post reporter about possible plans to attack the Syrian ruler. An attack “was not even discussed,” the US president said at the time.
Trump said in an interview with Fox News that he did not regret that there had not been an attack on Assad. But “he could have lived with it,” he added. “She certainly didn’t consider him a good person, but she could have turned him down if she wanted to.” Mattis was “against most things.”
Trump recalled that after Mattis’ resignation in 2018, two leading extremists were killed in US attacks. The leader of the terrorist militia “Islamic State”, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, died in 2019, the same year that Iranian General Qasem Soleimani was assassinated. “I turned off Soleimani, I turned off al-Baghdadi,” Trump said. “They were two of the biggest terrorists.”
