US President Barack Obama says intelligence agencies did not pick up specific threats to Paris, the site of coordinated attacks last week that killed at least 129 people, but had registered the potential for Islamic State violence in the West for the past year.
"The concerns about potential ISIL attacks in the West have been there for over a year now and they come through periodically," he said at a Group of 20 summit in Turkey on Monday, using a common acronym for Islamic State.
"There were no specific mentions of this particular attack that would give us a sense of something that we could provide French authorities, for example, or act on ourselves."
Obama also said the US would stick to its current strategy in the fight against Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq, again ruling out putting US troops on the ground in a fighting capacity.
"There will be an intensification of the strategy that we put forward but the strategy they we put forward is the strategy that ultimately is going to work," Obama said.
"But ... it's going to take time."
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