Ben Carson, after visit to refugee camp, says Syrians want to go home

By David Lawder WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson, after a visit to a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan this weekend, said on Sunday that the refugees do not want to come to the United States and would prefer to return to Syria. But Carson, one of the leaders in the polls in the contest for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, offered few details on how he would work to defeat Islamic State militants and stabilize Syria to enable the refugees' return. "We're hearing that they all want to come here to the United States, and that's not what they want. They want to go back home," Carson said on the ABC news program "This Week." In a round of television interviews from Jordan, Carson also defended comments he made earlier this month in which he compared Americans' attitude towards Syrian refugees to their fear of a rabid dog in their neighborhood. "The Syrians and the people here completely understood what I was saying," Carson told NBC's "Meet the Press". "It's only the news media in our country that thinks that you're calling Syrians dogs. They understand here that we're talking about the jihadists, the Islamic terrorists." Carson, a retired neurosurgeon who has faced scrutiny over his foreign policy credentials, visited the Zaatari camp for refugees fleeing Syria's civil war, and said he also spoke with medical personnel, humanitarian workers and government officials. In the ABC interview, Carson called for increased U.S. aid for regional refugee efforts such as those in Jordan. He said believes that greater contributions to such facilities in the region could eliminate security risks associated with granting U.S. asylum to Syrian refugees. "I believe that the right policy is to support the refugee program that is in place, that works extremely well but does not have adequate funding," Carson said. "If you do that, you solve that problem without exposing the American people to a population that could be infiltrated with terrorists who want to destroy us." Journalists were not invited to join Carson, who arrived in Jordan on Friday. Carson said that Islamic State should be defeated quickly and criticized the current U.S. strategy as "piecemeal." "I think we need to work in close conjunction with our Department of Defense, with our Pentagon, with our experts. Ask them what do you need in order to accomplish this? And then, let's make a decision," he told NBC. (Reporting by David Lawder; Editing by Alan Crosby)