“You don’t need a significant number to commit atrocities," Syrian President Bashar al-Assad says. | AP Photo Syria's Assad: Some refugees are terrorists

While President Donald Trump’s executive order banning Syrian refugees from entering the U.S. has been controversial around the world, it has the endorsement of at least one foreign leader: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

In an interview with Yahoo News, Assad said that there are “definitely” terrorists among the refugees fleeing his nation’s civil war. Evidence of this claim, Assad said, is easily found on the internet.


“The same picture that you saw them, in some cases, of course, in some instances, those terrorists in Syria, holding the machine gun or killing people, they are peaceful refugees in Europe or in the West in general. Yeah, that’s true,” the strongman Syrian president said.

The United Nations refugee agency has said as recently as late January that refugees from Syria pose no threat to the U.S. or other nations.

That terrorists might be among the refugees entering the U.S. from Syria was the principle justification that Trump and others in his administration have given for imposing a ban on Syrian refugees as well as entrants from six other majority-Muslim nations. While individuals from the other six nations are only banned temporarily from entering the U.S., Trump’s order placed an indefinite ban on refugees from Syria.

A stay of Trump’s order put in place by a federal judge in Seattle was unanimously upheld Thursday by a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The White House has said that it remains confident that the order will eventually win in court on its merits, but the action will remain out of effect until a court either overturns the stay upheld by the 9th circuit or a court rules on the order itself.

Assad has played a major role in creating the flow of refugees leaving his country, leading his nation’s military in a vicious civil war against Islamic State militants and rebel groups, some of which have been backed by the U.S. government. The Syrian military has used chemical weapons and barrel bombs in areas densely populated with civilians, killing thousands. Entire cities, most notably Aleppo, in the northwest part of the country, have been left in ruins by the Syrian military’s campaign.

The Syrian president said that Americans should be the ultimate judge of whether Trump’s immigrant and refugee policy is in the best interests of the U.S. As far as refugees are concerned, Assad said “for me, the priority is to bring those citizens to their country, not to help them immigrate.”

Of those seeking to enter the U.S. or other nations around the world, Assad said it is impossible to know how many might be terrorists, but that only a small number would be required to execute a large-scale attack.

“You don’t need a significant number to commit atrocities. Eleventh of September, it happened by only 15 terrorists out of maybe millions of immigrants in the United States,” Assad said, misstating the number of hijackers involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks (there were 19). “So it’s not about the number, it’s about the quality, it’s about the intentions.”