Trump says he will send all Syrian refugees home if he is US president

Donald Trump has announced that he will make all Syrian refugees leave the United States if he is elected president.

The Republican Party frontrunner said on Wednesday that he believed the Syrian refugees could be undercover members of the Islamic State (IS) group.

Speaking at a rally in New Hampshire, the billionaire businessman said: “I am putting the people on notice that are coming here from Syria as part of this mass migration, that if I win, if I win, they are going back, they are going back, I am telling you, they are going back.”

Trump set out his stall on Syria’s refugees on the same day Russia announced it was bombing the war-torn country, as part of Moscow’s policy to prop up the embattled government of President Bashar al-Assad.

“Look, if Russia wants to go in there, [it] would have been nice if we went in as a unified front, to be honest. But if Russia wants to go in there and knock out ISIS (IS) and maybe stabilise, this big migration with 200,000 people into the US…,” he also told CNN.

“If I win I’m going to say it right now and I’ll say it to you, those 200,000 people – they have to know this and the world will hear it – are going back.

“We’re not going to accept 200,000 people that may be IS. We have no idea who they are. And I’m telling you now, they may come in through the weakness of (President Barack) Obama,” but they will be returned home if Trump is president, he said.

More than 250,000 people have been killed since a 2011 pro-democracy uprising in Syria, which was brutally put down by President Assad, mutated into a savage multi-sided civil war.

Trump questioned why millions of people had fled their homes rather than stayed in Syria and fought.

The US has so far accepted 1,500 Syrian refugees in 2015. Secretary of State John Kerry recently announced Washington will raise the number of refugees allowed in by 15,000 over the next two years to make a total of 100,000 in 2017.

Kerry said the US will receive 85,000 refugees in 2016, with many coming from Syria.

Trump currently heads the polls for who will be the Republican candidate in the 2016 presidential election, while on the Democrat side socialist candidate Bernie Sanders is the surprise frontrunner.