Many of the most savage terrorists in Syria coming from Europe: Assad

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad says many of the most brutal terror kingpins who have come to Syria during its six-year conflict originate from Europe, blaming the continent for the phenomenon.

“Many of the most savage leaders of al-Qaeda in Syria, whether ISIS or al-Nusra, are coming from Europe,” Assad said in a statement to Western media outlets, which the official Syrian Arab News Agency carried on Monday.

ISIS is an English acronym for the Takfiri terrorist group of Daesh, which splintered from al-Qaeda in the 2000s and has been wreaking havoc in Syria over the past years. Al-Nusra Front, too, was al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria before it claimed to have broken ranks with it and rebranded itself.

“We have so many fighters from the Arabic world, but their leaders are coming mainly from Europe,” the Syrian president added.

The reason, he said, was that European countries had been marginalizing many people from certain echelons of the society and leaving them susceptible to inculcation by clerics preaching the radical ideology of Wahhabism.

“Especially in France…, they isolated these people and they allowed the Wahhabi clerics to come and infiltrate their mind, and this is where you are paying the price,” Assad said, apparently referring to the many attacks staged across Europe over the past years by home-grown terrorists.

“This [extremist] culture wasn’t part of the original culture, it’s something new that we’ve been seeing for the last few decades. Why? Because of the influence of the Wahhabi ideology that doesn’t accept any other one,” he said.