Syrian Arab News Agency S A N A
Damascus, SANA-President Bashar al-Assad said in an interview given to Yahoo News, to be broadcast on Friday at 1.00 p.m., that “as an official in the Syrian state, my responsibility is not to go and ask any president to allow the Syrians to go there and to have refuge in that country, My responsibility is to restore the stability, in order to bring them back to Syria and find refuge in their country.”
As for President Trump’s executive order barring refugees, immigrants, from predominantly Muslim countries, specifically all Syrian refugees, as their entry into the country would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, President al-Assad said “This question has two aspects: the first one is American, this is an American issue and it is related to the sovereignty of the American nation. Every country has the right to put any regulations to enter their country. We can disagree or agree, but if you ask me as president, as official in the Syrian state, my responsibility is not to go and ask any president to allow the Syrians to go there and to have refuge in that country. My responsibility is to restore the stability, in order to bring them back to Syria and find refuge in their country. So, I’m not going to discuss that this is right or wrong; this is American issue.
If some of those refugees, in his view, were aligned with terrorists or not, president al-Assad said “definitely. You can find it on the net; the same picture that you saw them – in some cases, of course – in some instances, those terrorists in Syria, holding the machinegun or killing people, they are peaceful refugees in Europe or in the West in general. Yeah, that’s true.”
On the number of terrorists among the 4.8 million Syrian refugees, President Assad said “no-one has any number, nobody knows, because nobody knows all the terrorists to give a percentage, no-one at all.”
If he believes it’s a significant number, President Assad added “It’s not about significant, because you don’t need a significant number to commit atrocities. 11th of September, it happened by only 15 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.
Mazen
