US President Donald Trump said he thinks Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei is “more rational” than his predecessor, adding in an interview with NBC that Khamenei is “pretty badly injured.”
“Younger, I think, more rational. Injured — he’s pretty badly injured. So, there’s a certain bravery there,” Trump said in the interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” which was recorded Friday and released this morning.
The new leader — who succeeded his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — has not been seen in public since he suffered injuries from an Israeli attack that killed his father on the first day of the war.
Trump would not disclose what he knew about the location of Mojtaba Khamenei.
“I don’t want to say whether or not I know where he is, but there’s a good probability that I do,” he said.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump said he is not planning to withdraw the roughly 50,000 troops involved in the Iran war until “we have a completion” in the country.
“I don’t consider (the troops) in danger,” Trump told “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker during a wide-ranging interview taped on Friday and released Sunday. “We have the best defense anyone’s ever seen. We have the best offense anyone’s ever seen. So I don’t consider it danger.”
“I would say it would be foolhardy to do that because maybe we may use them,” Trump added.
During the interview, Trump compared the number of casualties in the Iran operation to the US war in Vietnam, during which the US lost more than 58,000 troops.
“We’ve lost 13 people here and that’s a lot. Thirteen people, too many,” Trump said. “But, if you look at Vietnam, where hundreds of thousands of people were killed, if you look at any one of the last seven or eight wars where many, many people were killed, we lost 13. And again, 13 is too many. I don’t want to lose any. But 13 is less than anybody’s ever even envisioned.”
“I think we’re doing a great job,” he added.
13 US service members have been killed in connection with the conflict. Six service members were killed on March 1 after an Iranian strike in Kuwait’s Shuaiba port. A service member died March 8 following an attack by Iran on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia and six service members died March 12 when a US Air Force KC-135 Stratotanker refueling aircraft crashed on in western Iraq.
Source: CNN
– Agencies
