Washington
US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he wanted to assassinate Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad in 2017, but that his then secretary of defence Jim Mattis opposed the operation. “I would have rather taken him out. I had him all set,” Trump told the morning show Fox & Friends. “Mattis didn’t want to do it. Mattis was a highly overrated general, and I let him go.” The revelations support reporting that came out in 2018 when Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward published his book “Fear: Trump in the White House” and which the president denied at the time. “That was never even contemplated,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on September 5, 2018. –AFP
