US has accepted more than 500 Syrian refugees and plans to admit thousands more – and ISIS could slip into the country along with them
More than 500 refugees from Syria’s bloody civil war have already been resettled in the United States, and U.S. officials and members of Congress are becoming increasingly worried that jihadis linked to the ISIS terror army could slip into the country along with them.
Since war broke out in Syria nearly four years ago, America has welcomed 524 people from the rapidly disintegrating country with open arms. U.S. intelligence agencies lack the resources to vet them properly, but the Obama administration plans to admit a few thousand more this year.
‘The United States has admitted 524 Syrians since 2011,’ State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters on Feb. 13.
‘We’re likely to admit 1,000 to 2,000 Syrian refugees for permanent resettlement in Fiscal Year 2015 and a somewhat higher number, though still in the low thousands, in Fiscal Year 2016.’
Assistant Secretary of State Anne Richard said in December that the State Department already had about 9,000 Syrian cases on its agenda, and receives ‘roughly a thousand new ones each month.’ The Department of Homeland Security ultimately makes the decisions.
The idea that Islamist terrorists could use America’s generous asylum system to bring their Holy War to the U.S. has set off a frenzy of complaints that the U.S. lacks the ability and resources to properly screen every Syrian who seeks safe haven from the Bashar al-Assad regime.
‘It’s clearly a population of concern,’ National Counterterrorism Center director Nicholas Rasmussen told the House Homeland Security Committee on Feb. 11.
Committee Chairman Mike McCaul, a Texas Republican, replied that it would be a ‘huge mistake’ to resettle more Syrians in the U.S.
United Nations estimates suggest that as many as 4 million people have already fled Syria; another 7 million remain in the country but have been forced to leave their homes.
The ISIS army, a self-proclaimed ‘Islamic State,’ is based in the Syrian city of Raqqa. Its reign of brutality has included mass executions, countless war crimes and the routine sexual abuse of women taken as ‘wives’ from conquered territory in Syria and Iraq.
National Security Council spokesman Ned Price told Reuters in January that screening protocols for refugees ‘are rigorous, continually refined, and build on years of experience vetting individuals coming to the United States from around the world.’
‘They permit us to proceed in a way that seeks to both safeguard public safety and serve our mission of providing refuge to some of the world’s most vulnerable people.’
But vetting is only possible if intelligence agencies have reliable information about the petitioners, who are usually referred by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
FBI Assistant Director Michael Steinbach told the Homeland Security panel that unlike cases in Iraq, where the U.S. has had a presence for more than a decade, Syrians’ applications are rarely accompanied by robust information about the petitioners.
There’s ‘a lack of information’ about many of them, Steinbach admitted.
‘The difference is, in Iraq we were there on the ground collecting [intelligence], so we had databases to use.’
But ‘the lack of our footprint on the ground in Syria,’ he said, means that ‘the databases won’t have the information we need. You are talking about a country that is a failed state, that does not have any infrastructure so to speak.’
‘So all the data sets, the police, the intel services, that you would normally go to and seek that information, don’t exist.’
THE DAILY MAIL