The Netherlands will be acting illegally if it decides to bomb militant Islamic targets in Syria, the country’s president Bashar al-Assad said in an interview with the Dutch daily current affairs programme Nieuwsuur in Damascus.

Assad: 'This is illegal. This is against the international law. We are a sovereign country. If you are serious about fighting terrorism, what is the obstacle for that government to call the Syrian government, to say “let’s cooperate in fighting terrorism?”

'The only obstacle is that the Western policy today towards Syria is “we need to isolate this state, that president, so we cannot deal with him.” Okay, you cannot reach anything then.'

Nieuwsuur also asked president Assad why hundreds of Jihadis from Belgium and the Netherlands come to Syria.

Assad: ‘The most important question is: why did you have them in Europe? Coming, that’s natural; when you have chaos, when Syria has been turned into a hotbed for terrorism because Europe and Turkey and Saudi Arabia and Qatar and those countries supported terrorists in different ways, of course you’re going to have chaos, and it’s going to be a nexus for terrorism. That’s natural for this, how to say, fertile soil, to attract terrorists from the rest of the world. But the question: why did you have them in Europe? You didn’t deal with terrorism in a realistic base.’

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