President Donald Trump is indicating that it’s time for Europe to step up in the imprisonment and punishment of jihadist fighters, and that the days of the United States footing the bill for imprisoned terrorists are over.
The president went so far as to say that the U.S. will “drop” jihadis at the UK border if Britain does not dispose of its own captured ISIS terrorists. He called European allies a “tremendous disappointment” in a scorching attack yesterday, just moments after he announced the death of ISIS founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in northwest Syria last weekend.
Britain, France and Germany should be dealing with their ISIS captives at home, Trump declared, saying that the U.S. would not support hundreds of jihadists at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp “for the next 50 years.”
Europe has been resisting allowing the fighters back in but Trump said he would “drop them right on your border” if they are not taken back to face criminal proceedings and/or imprisonment.
“They came from France, they came from Germany, they came from the UK,” Trump said of the captive fighters. They came from a lot of countries. And I actually said to them, if you don’t take them, I’m going to drop them right on your border. And you can have fun capturing them again.”
He continued, “The United States taxpayer is not going to pay for the next 50 years. You see what Guantanamo costs.”
“We’re not going to pay tens of billions of dollars because we were good enough to capture people that want to go back to Germany, France, UK, and other parts of Europe.
“And they can walk back. They can’t walk to our country. We have lots of water in between our country and them.”
Detention camps in Syria are believed to be holding more than 10,000 militants, including some 2,000 foreign fighters. In addition, thousands of ISIS-linked women and children are held at the al-Hol camp in north-eastern Syria. Fears of a breakout have been on the rise since Turkey’s move into northern Syria further destabilized the region.
