Assad: Syrian Refugees resemble a threat to the west

Assad: Syrian Refugees resemble a threat to the west

Bashar Al-Assad has said in a new interview that some of the refugees are in fact terrorists, just days after Amnesty international published a report about mass execution in Assad regime’s prisons.

Yahoo News made an exclusive interview with Bashar al-Assad, the current Syrian president and the root cause of the six-year crisis in Syria.

The Syrian crisis began as a peaceful demonstration against the injustice in Syria. Assad regime used to fire power and violence against the civilians and led to armed resistance. 450.000 Syrians lost their lives in the past five years according to UN estimates, and more than 12 million have lost their homes. About 6 million Syrians became refugees scattered around the globe, 4.8 million of them fled to Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq while the rest became refugees in Europe, Canada, and the US.

Recently, the new US president Donald Trump declared a new order to ban the Syrian refugee resettlement program in the US definitely.

In the interview, Assad said President Trump’s freeze on admitting refugees from his country “is an American issue” on which he would not take sides. But asked if some of those who fled are “aligned with terrorists,” Assad quickly replied, “Definitely.”

“You can find it on the Net,” Assad went on: “Those terrorists in Syria, holding the machine gun or killing people, they [appear as] peaceful refugees in Europe or in the West.” He said he couldn’t estimate how many there might be, but he added that “you don’t need a significant number to commit atrocities.” He noted that the 9/11 attacks were pulled off by fewer than 20 terrorists “out of maybe millions of immigrants in the United States. So it’s not about the number, it’s about the quality, it’s about the intentions.”

As for the future of Syria’s 4.8 million refugees, Assad said, “For me, the priority is to bring those citizens to their country, not to help them immigrate.”

These remarks are kind of ironic, as they were declared a few days after a new scandal of Assad regime’s brutality has been revealed by Amnesty International, giving more shreds of evidence about the real cause of the Syrian refugee crisis.

Refugees have fled the regime’s brutality

Amnesty International has released a report saying that about 13.000 people were hanged secretly and thousands more killed by other ways in Saydnaya prison in Syria.

Nicolette Waldman, the co-author of the new report, said that these actions are the real cause of the refugee crisis.

“The Syrians are being bombed in their homes, in their schools, in illegal attacks on civilians and civilian targets, such as hospitals, which are rampant. And in the jails in Syria, civilians are being systematically targeted, civilians who just show any sign of dissent. And this is a systematic policy that has happened since 2011. This is widespread, and this is a calculated policy by the Syrian authorities,” she said.

“And I want to be very clear that while we at Amnesty have documented abuses on every side—and, actually, it also helps create the picture of how much civilians are suffering in Syria. But in the context of detention in particular, the Syrian authorities are carrying out the vast majority of violations,” she added.

“So, if you think about a population that has been terrorized—they have been arrested, disappeared, tortured and killed, on the scale of tens of thousands of people, and all of those people have family members—it does make sense to me that you might want to flee your country in that kind of circumstance. And many people don’t want to go. They end up going because they feel they have to. They’re running for their lives. And then to have that answered with a strict ban, it just doesn’t make any sense to me. And at Amnesty, we are very concerned about this ban for people who are refugees deserving of protection, not of being blocked and sent back into circumstances where they and their families can be treated in this just monstrous way.”