The head of policy planning at the State Department, Kiron Skinner, was fired on Thursday after nearly a year in the job, according to two sources familiar with the decision. 

The State Department declined to comment. Skinner did not respond to repeated emails requesting comment. 

The sources said Skinner, one of the highest-ranking African-American officials in the State Department, was told on Thursday she was being dismissed effective immediately. 

Skinner, a foreign policy scholar, was hired by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last year as a senior adviser and director of a unit responsible for crafting guidance on foreign policy. 

From the outset, she tried to articulate a "Trump Doctrine" to explain President Donald Trump's vision of America's place in the world. 

Skinner triggered hash rebukes and criticism from home and abroad in early May after she described the conflict with China as a "fight with a different civilization" and used racialized language to describe the conflict. 

"In China, we have an economic competitor, we have an ideological competitor – one that really does seek a kind of global reach that many of us didn’t expect a couple of decades ago," Skinner told a forum hosted by the New America Foundation and Arizona State University in Washington.

"And I think it's also striking that it's the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian."

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang then responded at a news briefing that "it is simply absurd and utterly unacceptable to look at China-U.S. relations from a clash-of-civilizations or even racist perspective."

(With input from Reuters, Xinhua)