President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday weighed in for the first time on the Syrian Islamist revolt against the country’s dictator Bashar al-Assad who is holed up in his palace in Damascus.
The radical Islamist movement reached the suburbs of the Syrian capital, Damascus, on Saturday and are preparing to storm the main bastion of Assad’s fledgling regime.
Trump warned on the social media platform Truth Social: "Syria is a mess, but is not our friend, & THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!"
Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, who used chemical weapons multiple times on his population, has fled Syria after rebels stormed the capital city of Damascus.
Assad’s decision in 2011 to launch a violent crackdown on pro-democracy Syrian activists during the Arab Spring revolts, which engulfed Egypt and Tunisia, resulted in the protracted civil war. Assad’s scorched-earth policy against the citizens of his country caused the killing of over 500,000 people.
The UN recently announced that it has stopped tracking the mounting death toll.
Syria has been embroiled in a bloody, 13-year civil war as Islamist rebels looked to overthrow the Assad dynasty. The apparent collapse of more than 50 years of Assad family rule over the Syrian Arabian Republic would a monumental turning point in Middle East power politics.
It was not known where Assad has fled.
Assad, who was trained as an eye doctor in the United Kingdom before succeeding his father, and his British-born wife, Asma al-Assad, fled with their three children, according to Syrian television reports.
A coalition of largely radical Islamist groups dislodged Assad’s Iran-backed regime. The U.S.-designated terrorist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Islamist former Al-Qaeda affiliate that is part of the rebel forces, played the decisive role in evicting Assad, who inherited his presidency in 2000 following the death of his father, Hafez Assad.
Abu Mohammed al-Golani, the Islamist leader of HTS, who has a $10 million bounty on his head from the U.S., seeks to present a toned-down version of the radical Islamism that has defined his years of fighting in Syria and in Iraq against American troops. Al-Golani was detained by the U.S. military in the first decade of this century.
Syrian experts have told Fox News Digital that HTS seeks to impose a totalitarian Islamist regime on the population. Phillip Smyth, an expert on Iranian regime proxy groups and Syria, who is with the Atlantic Council, told Fox News Digital, "HTS is a group that is an outgrowth of Al-Qaeda and has connections to Turkey. Their endgame is to create a Talibanesque society with a few tweaks."
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