Trump: Türkiye is very smart and will hold the key to events in Syria

US President-elect Donald Trump confirmed on Monday that Turkey is the "winning party" in Syria after the fall of the regime of ousted President Bashar al-Assad, considering that Ankara will have the "key to events" in this country.

Trump told reporters at his residence in Florida, "Nobody knows the final outcome in Syria, nor who the winning party is, but I think it is Turkey... Ankara will have the key to events" in this country.

"Türkiye took over Syria in an unfriendly way without losing many lives," he added, noting that Syria "has a lot of things that are still unclear."

The US President-elect also considered Türkiye to be "very smart" and its President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to be "a very smart and very strong man, and I get along very well with him, and he has built a very strong army."

Commenting on the fall of Assad and his escape to Moscow, Trump confirmed that he "did not think about asking (Russian President) Vladimir Putin to abandon" the ousted president.

"I can say that (Bashar) Assad was a butcher and you saw what he did to children," he added.

Commenting on the presence of US forces in Syria as part of what Washington says are efforts to combat the Islamic State group, Trump said, "I don't want our soldiers to be killed in Syria, but I don't think that's going to happen now."

He stressed that previously the United States had 5,000 soldiers along the Syrian border, and that the number had now decreased to 900 soldiers.

It is noteworthy that Turkey, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), supported the armed Syrian opposition whose assumption of power in Damascus ended a 13-year war against the regime of ousted President Bashar al-Assad.

Ankara reopened its embassy in the Syrian capital last Saturday, two days after Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan and intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalin visited Damascus.