Obama calls it shameful to impose religious test on refugees

President Barack Obama says the Islamic State is “the face of evil” and that all nations need to step up their efforts to combat the threat it poses.

Three teams of terrorists – all outfitted with suicide vests and armed with Kalashnikovs – swarmed six locations in Paris on Friday night and killed 129 people in a spree of shootings and explosions.

Putin launched an air campaign in Syria a month-and-half ago with the Islamic State as the top declared target.

The USA and its allies, however, have accused Moscow of focusing on other rebel groups in a bid to shore up Syria’s leader Bashar Assad, whom the West sees as the main cause of the Syrian conflict and the chief obstacle to peace.

“There will be an intensification of the strategy that we’ve put forward but the strategy that we are putting forward is the strategy that ultimately is going to work”, the president said at the G-20 summit in Antalya, Turkey.

Obama officials said they had no evidence of that. In response, he repeatedly stressed confidence in his approach to Syria, where a civil war has dogged his administration for years and helped create an opening for ISIS to flourish.

“I was very proud after 9/11 when he was adamant and clear about the fact that this is not a war on Islam”, the president said.

However, speaking to BBC radio before meeting Putin, Cameron appeared to suggest there was flexibility in Britain’s position on the Syrian president: “The disagreement has been that we think Assad should go at once and obviously Russian Federation has taken a different view and we have to find a settlement where Assad leaves and there is a government that bring Syria together”. The change had been “in the works for a while” and was accelerated after the attacks in Paris, he said.

“Slamming the door in their faces would be a betrayal of our values”, he said. Ted Cruz, who are both running for president, are the children of Cuban immigrants and have called for increased scrutiny of refugees fleeing Syria who seek asylum in the U.S.

Obama also pushed back against the assertion that his administration’s policy in Syria is problem-plagued.

The agreement would allow U.S. personnel to pass threat information including on Islamic State jihadists to France “even more quickly and more often” Obama added. The meeting in the seaside city of Antalya, just a few hundred miles from the Syrian border, was planned before the Paris attacks, but the carnage there ratcheted up the urgency in the talks.