Top Trump aide suggests boat strikes aim to topple Venezuela’s Maduro
Al Jazeera
White House’s Susie wiles appears to contradict the official narrative portraying the attacks as an antidrug campaign.
White House chief of staff Susie Wiles has suggested that the United States military’s attacks on alleged drug boats around Latin America aim to ultimately topple Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
In comments published by Vanity Fair magazine on Tuesday, Wiles appeared to contradict the Donald Trump administration’s stated rationale behind the bombing campaign – combating drugs.
“He [Trump] wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle. And people way smarter than me on that say that he will,” Wiles was quoted as saying.
Vanity Fair released a lengthy profile on Wiles on Tuesday, hours after the Pentagon announced three more boat strikes in the Eastern Pacific Ocean that it said killed eight people.
“So not a war on the cartels. It’s regime change,” Democratic Senator Chris Murphy wrote on X in response to Wiles’s comments. “Either way, totally illegal and nonsensical.”
The Ukrainian president says Kyiv could drop its long-held ambition of joining NATO in exchange for security guarantees.
Police not looking for anyone else over the shooting that wounded nine people at Ivy League school in northeastern US.
Renewed border clashes between Cambodia and Thailand entered a second week.
Multiple people have been reported injured in a shooting near the Ivy League campus in Providence, Rhode Island.
The gunman involved has been killed, with no information on motives as of yet.
Al Jazeera gains exclusive access to Uvira where fighting has killed hundreds.
Witnesses at the hospital and the UN say the attack killed medics, patients and may ‘amount to a war crime’.
Cambodia’s Ministry of Defence said Thai F-16 fighter jets continued to bomb targets inside country.
Incident in November latest reported instance of Trump administration’s increasingly aggressive maritime tactics.
Neither side has independently confirmed agreement, which comes amid five-day flare-up of cross-border fighting.
As M23 rebels capture strategic city Uvira despite Trump peace deal, displaced families recount chaos and death.
Report finds paramilitary group responsible for vast majority of attacks as conflict devastates civilian population.
Cambodia rejects claims of preparing to launch Chinese-made missiles and using foreign fighters in border clashes.