DONALD Trump has threatened to “drop” captured ISIS fighters on the UK border if the Government continues to bar British-born jihadis from returning to the country.
In an astonishing attack that put a fresh strain on relations with Washington, the US President said the UK, Germany and France had been a “tremendous disappointment” in dealing with ISIS fighters.
Mr Trump raised the pressure on Britain to change its policy on the return of ISIS fighters at a press conference in the wake of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s death.
The US wants ISIS fighters to face trial in their countries of origin and yesterday Mr Trump said the US taxpayer was not going to pick up the cost of dealing with the return of non-American ISIS fighters.
There are fears that Turkey’s recent offensive against Kurdish forces in north-east Syria will lead to the release of thousands of dangerous former ISIS fighters.
There were an estimated 60 British-born adults who were held captive in the region before the Turkish advancement.
'HAVE FUN CAPTURING THEM AGAIN'
In an angry riposte to the UK, France and Germany’s current policy Mr Trump warned yesterday that he would even take the extraordinary action of allowing the released ISIS fighters to reach the border of
Europe if they didn’t start taking responsibility for the fighters.
He blasted: “The European nations have been a tremendous disappointment. I personally called – my people called a lot – take your ISIS fighters and they didn’t want them.
“They said ‘we don’t want them’. They came from France, they came from Germany, they came from the UK, they came from a lot of countries.
"I actually said to them ‘if you don’t take ‘em, I’m going to drop them right on your border and you can have fun capturing them again.
“But 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 wanted to go back to Germany, France, the UK and other parts of Europe.”
The UK Government did not respond to Mr Trump’s comments yesterday.
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