Republican presidential candidate and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is taking some of the responsibility off of hawkish Republicans for helping to create the Islamic State (ISIS), where he previously laid most of the blame.
Paul said in an interview with Joe Scarborough last week on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that "ISIS exists and grew stronger because of hawks in our party who gave arms indiscriminately and most of those arms were snatched up by ISIS."
But in an interview on Fox News with Sean Hannity on Monday night, Paul backtracked on some of those comments.
"The ultimate people who are responsible for terrorism are obviously the terrorists," which he says means that ISIS is ultimately responsible for the "mayhem, the murders, the brutality, the beheadings."
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However, he added that "we can have a valid discussion over whether or not ISIS has grown stronger by pouring arms into the Islamic rebels in the Syrian civil war."
"As we did, even our ambassador said that we will be giving arms to people who will fight alongside al-Qaida and alongside ISIS," Paul told Fox News.
"It is objective truth that ISIS grew stronger the more weapons that went into the Syrian civil war," he said.
"I think it was an unintended consequence that ISIS grew stronger because of weaponizing these Islamic rebels in Syria."
Paul told Fox News that the responsibility for the arms that have fallen into ISIS' hands lies with a policy supported by President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as well as some in the Republican Party.
"I warned at the time that the great irony is that if you arm these people, one day we'll have to go back and fight against these weapons ourselves," the presidential candidate said.
Paul said in the interview with Hannity that he does think "we have to do something about ISIS" and that he's for "declaring war" against the jihadist group, but he finds it disappointing that "we have to fight against our own weapons."
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