Former President Trump said that Osama bin Laden ‘had one hit,’ the World Trade Center in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001, but that his administration took out two ‘monsters’ Qasem Soleimani and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Trump compared the al-Qaeda leader and mastermind behind 9/11, bin Laden, a terrorist taken out by the US under President Obama, to the two ‘nastier’ terrorists taken out under his administration.
Al-Baghdadi was the founder and leader of ISIS and Soleimani was one of Iran’s most powerful commanders.
‘We took out the founder of Isis, al-Baghdadi, and then of course Soleimani. Now just so you understand, Soleimani is bigger by many, many times than Osama bin Laden. The founder of ISIS is bigger by many, many times, al-Baghdadi than Osama bin Laden,’ Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Thursday.
‘Osama bin Laden had one hit, and it was a bad one, in New York City, the World Trade Centre. But these other two guys were monsters. They were monsters. And I kept saying for years why aren’t they getting them? For years, I said it. I got them,’ he said.
‘Osama bin Laden had one hit, and it was a bad one, in New York City, the World Trade Centre. But these other two guys were monsters. They were monsters. And I kept saying for years why aren’t they getting them? For years, I said it. I got them,’ Donald Trump said on the ‘Hugh Hewitt Show’
The 9/11 attacks killed 2,996 people in the US, taking down the Twin Towers in New York City. Hijackers crashed two planes in the World Trade Center, hijacked another that crashed in Shanksville, Pa., and a third that crashed into the Pentagon.
Bin Laden was also believed to have a hand in the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, where over 200 died, but was also behind the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, where
‘Isis is tougher than the Taliban, and nastier than the Taliban. And Isis was watching, and then they were, they didn’t exist anymore,’ Trump said.
He spoke after over 100 were killed Thursday, including 13 Americans, in attacks believed to have been carried out by ISIS-K as the US completes its hasty withdrawal from Kabul after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.
Bin Laden was killed in 2011 by a group of Navy SEALs who raided his compound in Pakistan. Al-Baghdadi was killed in 2019 in a military raid in northwest Syria, where he detonated a suicide belt.
In January 2020, Trump ordered an airstrike that killed Soleimani outside an airport in Baghdad.
Trump also told Hewitt he would have ‘bombed the hell out of the Taliban’ had they violated the peace agreement he struck with them in February 2020 and ‘they never would have come into Kabul.’
‘They just wouldn’t do it.’
Trump, appearing on Fox News’ ‘Hannity’ on Thursday, argued his administration ‘had them [the Taliban] totally under control.’
‘Every time we saw movement we hit them with an F-18 and the movement stopped,’ he said of keeping the Taliban out of Afghanistan.
‘Before, they would’ve gotten blown away. (Now) zero resistance,’ Trump said as he called Biden’s decision to take the US military out of Afghanistan ‘the dumbest move anybody has ever made perhaps in the history of our country, allowing this to happen’.
‘This country has never seen stupidity like this and our country is really in trouble,’ Trump said on the segment.
‘It’s only going to get worse… We had something where they didn’t get near us, they were petrified of us,’ he added after suggesting that this is no longer the case.
Trump claimed ‘had everything under perfect control’ before ‘Biden came in and they saw weakness’.