Turning Back Syrian Refugees Isn’t Just Wrong — It Helps ISIS

As French authorities combed an area just outside the Stade de France, where on Friday night a suicide bomber detonated an explosive vest meant for the crowd of thousands just inside, they found a small object that has since become the subject of enormous international attention: a Syrian passport.

Greek authorities said that a month earlier, a man traveling under the same name as on the passport had been registered as entering Greece through the island of Leros. They took fingerprints at the time, which match those on the suicide bomber.

The passport, French officials found, was fake. Nevertheless, the discovery has revived the specter of terrorists posing as refugees infiltrating the West and renewed calls to close the borders and refuse entry to all Syrian refugees — or at least all the Muslim ones. At least 23 US governors said on Monday that they'd attempt to block any efforts to resettle Syrian refugees in their states, and the few Republican presidential candidates who didn't outright declare that all Syrian refugees should be banned from entering the United States suggested that only Christian refugees should be allowed in.

Why ISIS hates Syria refugees

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“It makes them look bad,” Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, explains.

Once refugees flee to Europe, however, ISIS hopes that they're denied entry and mistreated. “A backlash against the refugee population,” Gartenstein-Ross explains, “serves their interests in a number of ways.”

“Having this wedge driven, where [ISIS] is able to intensify the backlash against refugees might help with recruiting efforts by extremists to recruit among the refugee population,” Gartenstein-Ross says.

“Game it out from their perspective,” he continues. “If they were able to move operatives into Europe, posing as migrants and refugees, then that's a major win for them,” both as an act of terror and to increase anti-refugee sentiment in Europe.

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