Top U.S. counterterrorism officials have been warning for months that the intelligence on the
ground in Syria is insufficient to thoroughly vet individuals traveling to the United States from
the conflict zone. It is difficult both to confirm that Syrian asylum-seekers are who they claim to
be and to determine they do not have ties to terrorist groups.
• Recently, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services official Matthew Emrich disclosed that the
government does not have access to any database in Syria that can be used to check the
backgrounds of incoming refugees against criminal and terrorist records.17 Nevertheless, it was
revealed that over 90% of Syrian refugee applicants get approved, despite intelligence gaps
and absent the ability to thoroughly check for security risks.18
• According to former FBI assistant director Tom Fuentes, “Our human sources [in Syria] are
minimal, and we don’t have a government we can partner with, and that’s a key thing.”19
• National Counterterrorism Center Director Nicholas Rasmussen explained that “the intelligence
picture we’ve had of this [Syrian] conflict zone isn’t what we’d like it to be… you can only review
[data] against what you have.”20
• Affirming these concerns, FBI Director James Comey testified in October to the Committee that
“we can only query against that [data] which we have collected. So if someone has not made
a ripple in the pond in Syria in a way that would get their identity or intentions reflected in our
databases, we can query our databases until the cows come home, but nothing will show up
because we have no record of that person…You can only query what you have collected.”21
• Earlier this year, FBI Assistant Director Michael Steinbach said that “the concern in Syria is that
we don’t have the systems in places on the ground to collect the information… All of the data
sets, the police, the intel services that normally you would go and seek that information [from],
don’t exist.”22https://
www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://homeland.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/HomelandSecurityCommittee_Syrian_Refugee_Report.pdf&ved=0ahUKEwjV9uG-6rDNAhVCT1IKHVZGBwoQFggvMAU&usg=AFQjCNFTu4lfXs_zxkVttkli-A1W_6pUCg&sig2=_Ja5LHkBP3ErY6zb8YlQOA