*WASHINGTON: *
US President Donald Trump said Tuesday he wanted to assassinate Syrianstrongman Bashar al-Assad in 2017, but that his then-secretary of defenseJim Mattis opposed the operation.
“I would have rather taken him out. I had him all set,” Trump told themorning show*Fox & Friends*.
“Mattis didn’t want to do it. Mattis was a highly overrated general, and Ilet him go.”
The revelations support reporting that came out in 2018 when WashingtonPost journalist Bob Woodward published his book “Fear: Trump in the WhiteHouse” and which the president denied at the time.
“That was never even contemplated,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Officeon September 5, 2018.
Trump’s Tuesday remarks came as part of a castigation against Mattis, whomthe president hailed as a “great man” when he hired him to run thePentagon, but soured on the retired general who eventually resigned in late2018.
Trump was reportedly mulling assassinating Assad after the Syrian presidentlaunched a chemical attack on civilians in April 2017.
The US leader said American forces should “go in” and “kill” Assad,Woodward reported in his book.
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The journalist — famous for uncovering the 1970s Watergate scandal thatbrought down president Richard Nixon — wrote that Mattis told Trump hewould “get right on it” but returned with plans for a more limitedairstrike.
Trump told Fox he did not regret the decision not to target Assad, sayinghe “could have lived either way with that.”
“I considered him certainly not a good person, but I had a shot to take himout if I wanted and Mattis was against it,” Trump said.
“Mattis was against most of that stuff.”
Assad has ruled Syria throughout the country’s devastating years-long civilwar in which hundreds of thousands have been killed.
His regime is accused of a series of crimes including torture, summaryexecutions, rape and the use of chemical weapons. -APP/AFP
