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US President Donald Trump said he has no regrets for failing to liquidate the Syrian regime president, Bashar al-Assad, and that he had the opportunity to do so, in response to the chemical attack carried out by regime forces. Syrian more than 3 years ago in the city of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib (northern Syria). .
Trump added in an interview with Fox News on Tuesday that it was former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis who advised him not to do so, considering he was a terrible general and a bad leader.
He continued, speaking of his plan to liquidate Bashar al-Assad after the attack on Khan Sheikhoun in April 2017: “I would have preferred to kill him. I was fully prepared.”
He also said, “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.”
At that time, the US president’s administration responded with missile strikes targeting Syrian regime military sites.
Trump’s comments came in response to a question about a passage from Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward’s book “Fear,” who says the president called Mattis and told him he wanted to kill the lion after the chemical attack that resulted. in more than 100 Another 500 dead and wounded.
According to Woodward, Mattis told Trump he would follow up, but then told an aide that they were acting more cautiously. Ultimately, his team came up with a plan to launch airstrikes on targets that Trump ultimately ordered.
Notably, Trump denied on September 5 that he even thought of killing the head of the Syrian regime for the use of chemical weapons against his people.
The president of the United States had described Mattis as a great man before the dispute between them broke out, so the latter resigned at the end of 2018.
In the same interview with “Fox News”, Trump spoke about the assassination of former Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a military operation that took place in October last year in the village of Barisha in Idlib governorate (northwest of Syria).
The US president said that after he destroyed ISIS, Al-Baghdadi tried to rebuild the organization and ordered its assassination.
“I ordered his assassination, as many people were killed, and the same applies to Soleimani,” he added, referring to former Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, who was killed earlier this year in a US raid that took as Target the Iranian leader’s convoy as it left Baghdad International Airport.
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