The Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said his country was not a breeding ground for the Islamic State group, blaming the creation of the jihadist organization on the West.
“I can tell you Daesh doesn’t have the natural incubator, social incubator, within Syria,” he said in a television interview with Italian national broadcaster Rai, using the Arabic acronym for the IS group.
Jihadists who trained in Syria for the Paris massacres and other attacks had done so due to “the support of the Turks and the Saudis and Qatari, and of course the Western policy that supported the terrorists in different ways,” he insisted.
IS “didn’t start in Syria, it started in Iraq, and it started before that in Afghanistan,” he said, quoting former British prime minister Tony Blair as saying “the Iraqi war helped create ISIS”.
