US President Barack Obama acknowledged that attacks by lone individuals present a new security challenge, while seeking to reassure Americans that ISIS can be defeated.
Throughout the week, Obama tried to reassure Americans worried about security that his administration could confront the terrorist threat. At his final press conference of the year last Friday, he stressed the difficulty of the task.
Obama said: “It is very difficult for us to detect plots by lone individuals.” He added: “Despite tremendous vigilance and professionalism in enforcing all our laws, we cannot always detect them.”
Before traveling to San Bernardino, the California city where a shooting occurred, and then to Hawaii to begin his Christmas holiday, the president said: “It is a different kind of challenge from what we faced with an organization like al-Qaeda.”
He added: “Essentially, there is ISIS trying to incite someone who may fall prey to this kind of propaganda.”
He said part of addressing the problem lay in ending the brutal war in Syria, which had created fertile ground for ISIS to grow.
Obama said: “In our view, peace cannot be established in Syria and the civil war cannot end unless there is a government whose legitimacy is recognized by a majority in the country.”
He added that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad would have to “leave to stop the bloodbath and allow all participating parties to move beyond sectarianism.” Obama reiterated that Assad had “lost legitimacy in the eyes of a large majority in his country.”
He said working with Assad against ISIS, as Iran and Syria proposed, would make the United States “more vulnerable to terrorist activity.”