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US President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he wanted to assassinate Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in 2017, but his then Defense Secretary James Mattis opposed the operation.
“I would have preferred to kill him,” Trump said on the morning show “Fox and Friends.” “I was perfectly prepared for it.” He added: “Mattis didn’t want him to do that … Mattis was a general who overestimated him and let him go,” Agence France-Presse reported.
This claim is corroborated by information published in 2018 when Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward published his book, Fear: Trump in the White House. Trump denied it at the time.
“It wasn’t even thought about,” Trump told reporters on September 5, 2018.
Trump’s comments (Tuesday) came as part of his criticism of Mattis, whom the president described as a “great man” when he appointed him to head the Pentagon, but his relations worsened with the retired general, who eventually resigned at the end of 2018.
According to press reports, Trump had considered assassinating Assad after accusing the Syrian president of launching a chemical attack against civilians in April 2017.
Woodward mentioned in his book that Trump said US forces should “go in” and “kill” Assad.
Woodward, who became famous in the 1970s for uncovering the “Watergate” scandal that toppled President Richard Nixon, wrote that Mattis told Trump, “I will act immediately,” but came back with plans to launch an airstrike. limited.
Trump told “Fox” that he did not regret the decision not to target Assad, and said he could “have lived with both.”
“I definitely thought he was not a good person, but I had a chance to get rid of him if I wanted to and Mattis was against that … Mattis was against most of those things,” Trump said.
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