The president-elect of the United States, Donald Trump, announced this Saturday that he will ignore the crisis that began ten days ago in Syria with the lightning offensive launched by jihadists and rebels against the government of President Bashar al Assad and has blamed former US President Barack Obama for having a large part of the blame for the current situation.
In a statement published on his social network Truth Social, Trump describes that “the Syrian opposition fighters, in an unprecedented movement, have taken control of several cities during a very well coordinated offensive and right now they are on the outskirts of Damascus to execute, it is clear, a major operation to finish off Al Assad.”
Trump then accused Obama of being unable to “honour his promises” in Syria and of leaving the situation in the hands of Russia, “which is so tied up in Ukraine that it seems unable to stop this march, literally speaking, through Syria, a country they have protected for years.”
President Obama then opted to support moderate Syrian rebels to fight the jihadist organisation Islamic State through the deployment of American special forces, but he never got deeply involved in the conflict so as not to trigger an open conflict with Russia or Iran.
Moscow did end up intervening in 2015 with a military campaign that led the rebels and jihadists to retreat into isolated strongholds and to reorient the course of the war in favour of the Syrian president, until now.
Trump has reasoned that the advance of the opposition to expel Al Assad and the Russian forces in the country “is possibly the best thing that could happen” to Moscow. “Syria has never really been of much benefit to Russia. It’s probably the best thing that could happen to them. It’s just made Obama look stupid,” he added.
The president-elect ultimately concluded that Syria “is a disaster in any case” and that, since “it’s not a friendly country,” the United States “should have nothing to do with it.” “It’s not our fight. Let whatever happens happen. Let’s not get involved,” he concluded.
