Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said if Western nations stopped supporting terrorists, the refugee crisis threatening Europe would end.
“If you are worried about them, stop supporting terrorists,” Assad said in an interview with Russian media. “That’s what we think regarding the crisis. This is the core of the whole issue of refugees.”
“It’s not about that Europe didn’t accept them or embrace them as refugees, it’s about not dealing with the cause,” said the president of Syria.
Assad then went on to blame Europe, saying it “is responsible because it supported terrorism.”
“Can you feel sad for a child’s death in the sea and not for thousands of children who have been killed by the terrorists in Syria?” Assad said, referring to the images of a refugee Syrian boy that went viral in recent weeks. “And also for men, women, and the elderly? These European double standards are no longer acceptable.”
Assad may have been referring to the European Union’s decision to end an arms embargo on rebel Syrian groups in May 2013. The United States authorized arms and training to moderate Syrian rebels, but so far has had difficult finding groups that qualify.
Over 4 million Syrians have fled a five-year civil war in their homeland. Assad is accused of using chemical weapons against his own people, and the Islamic State set up its capital in the Syrian city of Raqqa. Nearly a quarter of a million people have died.
Assad said he wants to cooperate with any country that will fight the Islamic State and hoped that the West and Saudi Arabia would build a “real antiterrorist coalition,” Interfax reported.
The United States is not cooperating with Syria’s opposition to the Islamic State, he said, and shows ‘willful blindness” on the issue.
“They cannot accept the reality that we are the only power fighting [the Islamic State] on the ground,” he said of the U.S. “For them, maybe if they cooperate with the Syrian Army, this is like a recognition or our effectiveness in fighting [the Islamic State].”
