After touring Syrian refugee camps in Jordan, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson suggested that camps should serve as a long-term solution for millions, while other refugees could be absorbed by Middle Eastern countries. “So you need to be working on some type of mechanism to keep it from being a perpetual turmoil”.
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After meeting with refugees at a camp in Jordan, Carson, 64, told CNN that “their true desire is to be resettled in Syria”. His campaign did not alert reporters about the visit in advance and did not grant media outlets any access.
He added, “I think the most compassionate thing when you’re fighting a war is to do it quickly”.
Colyer said that he first talked with Carson about the trip in September but that it was kept quiet for security reasons.
Carson said that it was up to the worldwide community to provide better support and encouragement to Arab countries hosting the refugees, though he stressed to the AP that US aid should be raised by Americans themselves, rather than through increased government spending.
“All they need is adequate funding”.
“It seems like everybody in the worldwide community is spending more time saying, “How can we bring refugees here?’ rather than, ‘How can we support a facility that is already in place that the refugees are finding perfectly fine when it’s adequately funded?'” Carson said on CBS” “Face The Nation”. He also insisted that the refugees were “a lot happier. They were quite willing to stay there as long as it takes before they can get back home”, he said.
“I’d say he’s 75 percent of the way there”, Armstrong Williams, Carson’s longtime business manager and closest confidant, said last week of the candidate’s grasp of foreign policy. Advisers have conceded that his knowledge of global affairs isn’t where it needs to be and have expressed hope that missions like his two-day trip to Jordan will help.
President Barack Obama has said the USA will take in 10,000 refugees, a fraction of the hundreds of thousands who reached Europe this year. And after speaking with them, Carson’s conclusion is that bringing them to the USA would solve absolutely nothing.
When asked whether he had second thoughts about using the term “rabid dogs” earlier this month when discussing Syrian refugees, he said the Syrian people understood what he meant.
In addition to killing more than 250,000 people, the war that has raged in Syria has produced the worst refugee crisis since World War II, with more than 4.2 million people fleeing the country since 2011 and another 7 million displaced within it. Most were given temporary shelter in neighboring countries, but overwhelmed hosts nations balk at long-term integration. “But they need a lot more help”.
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A Syrian woman buys vegetables on the main commercial alley dubbed the “Champs Elysee” after Paris’ famous avenue by the refugees of the Zaatari refugee camp by the refugees of the Zaatari refugee camp, in northwestern Jordan, on September 30, 2015.
