The US President Donald Trump admitted that he was considering the option of eliminating Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, but he was dissuaded by the head of the US Department of Defense James Mattis.
“I considered him (Assad – ed.), of course, not a good person. I thought about trying to eliminate him if I wanted to, but Mattis was against it. Mattis was against most of these things,”, -Trump said on Fox News on Tuesday.
According to him, he does not regret that he did not take the decision to eliminate Assad.
“I could live this way and that”, – Trump explained.
Retired US Marine Corps General Mattis has served as head of the Pentagon since January 2017 and left on January 1, 2019 due to disagreements with the president. Trump announced Mattis’ resignation in December 2018, thanking him for his work. He was supposed to leave in February 2019. After that, Mattis’s farewell letter to the president was released, in which he recommended that Trump find a minister whose views would be more in line with his views. The media wrote that Trump regarded this as a personal attack amid disagreements with Mattis over the withdrawal of US troops from Syria. As a result, Trump announced that Mattis would step down on January 1, 2019, earlier than planned.