At the fourth Republican presidential debate on Wednesday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis used his time serving in the Middle East to explain why he called the clothes worn by Al Qaeda “man dresses.”

At the NewsNation-hosted discussion, DeSantis was asked about comments he had made in the past that he would allow the shooting of drug smugglers coming across the southern border.

It wasn’t like that for Al Qaeda when I was in Iraq. Everybody you saw going down the street was dressed as a man. DeSantis said, “You didn’t know if they had an IED, or bomb, on them or not.”

It wasn’t the first time DeSantis had used the phrase “man dresses” to seem to refer to a thobe. He has used the phrase in public, like in Iowa and South Carolina.

In July, DeSantis talked about Marines being sent to Ramadi “not knowing whether the next person walking down the street in a man dress has a bomb on them or not.” It was in Iowa.

After the last debate, DeSantis made Muslim and Arab Americans angry when he used the term “so-called Islamophobia.”

Last week, three Palestinian American students in Vermont were shot. After the shooting, DeSantis’ team said he stood by what he had said before.

DeSantis has taken a strong, and controversial, stance against countries where the majority of the people are Muslim. In 2015, as a congressman, he proposed the Terrorist Refugee Infiltration Prevention Act, which was a lot like Donald Trump’s so-called Muslim travel ban. Refugees from some countries would not have been able to come in “if the alien is a national of, has habitually resided in, or is claiming refugee status due to events in any country containing terrorist-controlled territory.” The bill did not move on to the next stage.