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US President Donald Trump: "I've had him so far"
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SAUL LOEB / AFP
In 2017, US President Donald Trump said he was on the verge of ordering a military strike against the 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 so far," said the US president of Assad.
"But Mattis didn't want to do it."
In the same breath he rated his former defense minister on the program "Fox & Friends" as a "highly overrated general".
With this confession, Trump refuted his own statements on assassination plans against Assad from the year 2019. At that time Trump had vigorously contradicted a passage from a book by a reporter for the "Washington Post" about possible attack plans against the Syrian ruler.
An attack was "not even discussed," said the US President at the time.
Trump said in an interview with Fox News that he did not regret that there was no 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 turned him off if I wanted to."
Mattis was "against most of the stuff".
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 the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani was killed.
"I switched off Soleimani, switched off al-Baghdadi," said Trump.
"They were two of the biggest terrorists."
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mes / dpa / AFP
