“We’re holding thousands of ISIS fighters right now, and Europe has to take them. If Europe doesn’t take them, I’ll have no choice but to release them into the countries from which they came, which is Germany and France and other places. We beat them. We captured them. We’ve got thousands of them.”
Trump added: “We don’t want them’. We’re going to tell them [the Europeans] and we’ve already told them.” He did not give a cut-off date for his threat, but said: “It’s moving along, my deadline. They know.”
The bottom line was funding, he said. “The United States will not keep them in Guantanamo for 50 years and pay for it,” said Trump, recalling that the “caliphate” of the Islamic State, from a geographical point of view, had been totally destroyed.
Thousands of people, including men, women and children from more than 50 countries, are currently being held in detention camps run by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Syria.
The issue is likely to be debated during a two-day summit of the G7 summit in Biarritz, France.
“At a certain point Russia, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Turkey they are going to have to fight their battles too. I did it in record time but at a certain point all of these other countries where ISIS is around they have been decimated, by the way, badly decimated,” said the Republican head of state. And then he explained his line of reasoning: “Because do we want to stay there 19 more years? I do not think so, no.”
A US withdrawal from Afghanistan of 14 000 American troops before next year’s US election, will mean additional votes for Trump. His comments came only days after some 80 people died in a suicide attack launched by the ISIS in Kabul.
More than 2 300 US soldiers have died in Afghanistan, and more than 20 000 have been wounded.
