“Every day we have threat streams coming through the intelligence transit… and the concerns about potential ISIL [ISIS] attacks in the West have been there for over a year now, and they come through periodically”, the president said at the G20 Summit in Antalya, Turkey.
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Obama said he envisioned escalating that strategy, not overhauling it. And he called on other nations to step up their involvement in the fight against the extremists.
Late Sunday Iraqi Foreign Minister Ibrahim al Jaafari told reporters that Iraqi intelligence had learned that “some countries, in particular France, would be targeted by ISIS”.
President Barack Obama sharply defended his strategy Monday for going after ISIS, saying airstrikes had been effective in taking out key members of the terror group’s leadership. The talks were overshadowed by Friday’s attacks in Paris that killed at least 129 people.
The Paris attacks have dashed whatever momentum Obama had been enjoying in his battle against ISIS, including helping Kurdish fighters retake Sinjar Mountain in Iraq and apparently killing the ISIS executioner “Jihadi John” in a drone strike.
Obama condemned critics who want a “religious test” for admitting refugees from Syria, blasting the idea as un-American.
Obama officials said they had no evidence of that. “We don’t have religious tests (for) our compassion”.
He said: “We need to be doing everything we can to protect against more attacks and protect our people”.
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The president also responded forcefully to calls that the USA limit the immigration of Syrians fleeing the fighting in their homeland, or as a few Republican presidential candidates suggested, allow only Christians to enter the US.
