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US President Donald Trump has confirmed for the first time that he wanted Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad to be assassinated as early as 2017. Only his then defense minister, James Mattis, opposed this plan, Trump told Fox News on Tuesday (local time). ‘I would have preferred to turn it off. I’ve had it up to here, ”Trump said. “But Mattis didn’t want to.” At the same time, he called Mattis on “Fox & Friends” a “highly overrated general.”
With this confession, Trump refuted his own statements about plans to assassinate Assad in 2019. At the time, Trump had forcefully 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.
“I could have turned it off if I wanted to”
Trump said in his conversation with Fox that he did not regret that there had not been an attack on Assad. But “he could have lived with it,” he added. “I certainly didn’t see him as a good person, but I could have rejected him if I wanted to, but Mattis was against it.” 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 Islamic State terrorist militia, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, died in 2019, this year Iranian General Ghassem Soleimani was assassinated. “I turned off Soleimani, I turned off al-Baghdadi,” Trump said. “They were two of the biggest terrorists.” (SDA)
