President Barack Obama, during a joint White House news conference with French President Francois, Hollande, noted that refugees entering the United States go through a rigorous screening process, a reference to claims that at least one of the terrorists involved in the recent Paris attacks entered that country hidden among Syrian refugees.

“Nobody who sets foot in America goes through more screening than refugees,” Obama said. “As Francois has said, our humanitarian duty to help desperate refugees and our duty to our security—those duties go hand in hand.”

Keeping Syrian refugees out of the U.S., on grounds that they could be ISIS terrorists, has been a big subject for 2016 presidential candidates. However a House bill that passed last Thursday to suspend a refugee program for Syrian and Iraqi refugees garnered 47 Democrat votes as well. Many are concerned about the vetting process, while others cite the need to prioritize which refugees to admit, such as persecuted Christians in the Syrian region.

“We have to be concerned about the safety of the people of the United States,” said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher , R-Calif.,, during a recent joint Homeland Security Committee hearing. “If it means prioritizing and making sure that we do differentiate and say the Christians that are now the most vulnerable are the ones that are going to have the most priority, let’s go for it.”

Obama has said he would veto the bill.

The New York Times recently released an easy-to-read infographic detailing the vetting process for refugees into 20 steps. It consists of multiple security checks, interviews, referrals and fingerprint screenings.

Syrian refugees undergo additional steps, including review by a Citizenship and Immigration Services refugee specialist. While France is preparing to take in 30,000 Syrian refugees, it is widely reported that the United States has taken no more than 2,000 Syrian migrants since the civil war started in 2011.

A visual explanation of the process can provide sound information and clarity to Americans who have opinions on allowing refugees into the country but who don’t know what current restrictions are.

While covering a committee hearing on Transportation Security Administration reform, a deputy communications director, Matthew Ballard, informed me of a recent report from the House Homeland Security Committee analyzing the unprecedented growth in the number of foreigners traveling to Syria and other terrorist areas across the globe.

The increase is occurring despite U.S. air strikes killing over 10,000 ISIS combatants. According to the report, “When the strikes began, counterterrorism officials estimated the total number of extremists was around 15,000…Today the figure stands at 25,000-plus foreign fighters.”

The flow of foreign fighters continued despite U.S. airstrikes, which numbered more than 5,000 since August 2014. Fighters continue to stream in from Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Western countries including the U.K., France and the U.S.

The number of foreign fighters traveling from America is substantially smaller than a country like Tunisia (with over 5,000 recorded travelers) but also is the group the task force knows the most about. It found that American fighters are largely influenced by the ISIS global branding through its heavy social media presence. ISIS, unlike previous terrorist organizations, uses full advantage of the ability to craft and hone its own message with Twitter, Tumblr and other platforms while editing “Hollywood-style” videos illustrating its violent acts and power in the region.

The report finds that the pervasiveness of this social media effort is not simply ISIS top leaders sending out tweets from Iraq and Syria but that is channeled through its foreign fighters to their home countries, leading to more recruits. The grassroots nature of the foreign fighter recruitment poses an immense challenge for governments including the U.S. to monitor and prevent their citizens from joining ISIS or returning to recruit and carry out attacks in their respective countries.

Online recruitment for ISIS often moves from public to private channels. For instance, potential recruits watch publicly available “seminars” on social platforms are then directed to encrypted services such as Telegram. The government has yet to figure out an effective way to stop the online recruitment other than private citizens, family members and friends who have tipped off 75 percent of arrest cases related to potential U.S.-born foreign fighters.

A witness speaks about strategy in Syria. (Sam Fiske/MEDILL NSJI)

WASHINGTON — Russia’s recent airstrikes in Syria are prompting concerns that America is losing power and political influence in the region. And the fact that Russia is reportedly targeting positions that include those held by U.S.-trained rebel factions – but not by the Islamic State group, also known as ISIL or ISIS – is widely seen as underscoring the divide between American and Russian strategies.

“I believe Russia will first and foremost protect Assad and its port, and ensure its own continued role and influence,” Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow specializing in national security and defense policy at the Brookings Institution, said in an email, referring to Russia’s naval facility in the Syrian city of Tartus. “Defeating ISIL in the first instance matters less to them.”

Russia’s perceived intent to attack terrorist forces fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad – its historic ally – while focusing less on the Islamic State group alarmed lawmakers this week, who decried what many of them see as America’s lackluster Middle Eastern counterterrorism strategy.

Since last year, the U.S. has conducted airstrikes against the Islamic State group, provided air cover for ground forces like the Kurdish peshmerga, and trained and equipped rebel ground forces. The Pentagon announced Tuesday it had “paused” sending forces it has trained back into Syria after confirming previous reports some of those rebels had traded their U.S.-issued gear and vehicles to extremists in exchange for safe passage through areas they controlled.

But even before that, results had been mixed.

At a hearing Tuesday in Washington, members of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade questioned witnesses about the effectiveness of these tactics, particularly the so-called “train and equip” mission.

“The indigenous ground forces in Syria and Iraq are not capable of defeating ISIS,” retired U.S. Army Gen. John M. Keane told the panel. “We are not only failing, we are losing this war. Moreover, I can say with certainty this strategy will not defeat ISIS.”

When done right, training and equipping indigenous forces is considered by some military experts to be an effective strategy for stabilizing a region. In a phone interview, Ben Connable, an analyst for the RAND Corp. and a retired Marine intelligence officer, compared the U.S. training in the Middle East to the French attempts to build a militia force in South Vietnam in the 1950s.

“They were in a hurry. They wanted to get out of Indochina,” said Connable. “So what they did was rush the half-trained force into the field and they were destroyed piecemeal.”

The situation, in Connable’s view, is similar to present-day Syria.

Airstrikes prevent gains by the Islamic State group and eliminate targets, but they have done little to quell the insurgent activities tearing through Iraq and Syria.

“High-value targeting is most effective when it is combined with other counterinsurgency measures,” said Thomas Joscelyn, a witness at the Tuesday committee hearing and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Unfortunately, there are currently no boots on the ground truly capable of implementing a large-scale counterinsurgency strategy.”

America’s inability to develop a successful trained militia in Syria or maintain a concrete strategy allowed Russian President Vladimir Putin to criticize the U.S. in an address to the United Nations on Monday and call for a “broad international coalition” to fight ISIS and other terrorists, such as the al-Nusra Front.

The subcommittee chairman, Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, offered his concerns that the U.S. won’t achieve one of its principal objectives: removing Assad from power.

“It is a reality,” Keane said in response to Poe’s concerns that Russia’s new tactics will successfully prop up Assad. “I would tell Mr. Putin that I’m going to fly my airplanes where I want, when I want and you’re not going to interfere with them.”

Keane believes that the U.S. will eventually be able to remove Assad from leadership in Syria, with or without the help of the Russians. But with the Russian military now involved, it is not clear how or when that will happen.

Daniel Benjamin, another committee witness, noted Thursday that Russian military support has revitalized the Assad government.

Complicating matters is the fact that the Syria-Russia relationship goes well beyond the military alliance.

“There is an emotional connection between the Russian military and Syria,” Connable said. “The Syrian officers married Russian women and the Russian officers married Syrian women. It’s not just a political relationship, it’s a socio-cultural relationship as well.”

Stephen Blank, a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, said America’s limited military role in Syria is giving Russia an even stronger position of power.

“The fundamental problem is this administration does not know how to cover political objectives with military strategies,” Blank said of the Obama White House, adding that Russia has “a capability to project power in well-defined strategic objectives.”

Russia, which began bombing anti-Syrian government forces Wednesday, has forced the U.S. government to reassess its strategy in the Middle East. Lawmakers and experts who participated in Tuesday’s panel appeared to agree America must revisit its counterterrorism efforts in Syria.

“I think it’s time this administration goes back to the drawing board,” said Rep. Scott Perry, R-Penn.

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