SLIPPERY ROCK — The civil war in Syria and recent terrorist attacks in Paris, Beirut and elsewhere have created a lot of uncertainty among the American public.

Are we safe here in the United States? Should the U.S. government be turning away Syrian refugees? What is ISIS and what threat does it pose?

These were some of the questions tackled by students and faculty members Thursday at a question-and-answer session held at Slippery Rock University.

Anthropology instructor Aksel Casson said the event was designed to pool resources among the faculty to help students better understand current events.

Casson and several other faculty members gave a brief background about ISIS, the radical group that controls an area in Syria and Northern Iraq.

The rise of ISIS, which stands for Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, dates back to 2003 when the United States invaded Iraq and removed Saddam Hussein from power, Casson said.

The country’s new democratic government was not effective at creating stability at first, which led to groups like al Qaeda and ISIS recruiting members and launching terrorist attacks.

Today ISIS acts like a sovereign nation, even doing things such as printing its own money.

“The world has this very real threat. They control territory, they operate as a state, they control resources,” Casson said.

Business professor Abbas Noorbakhsh said the chances of getting killed in an attack are very slim, especially compared to more common threats like vehicle accidents or domestic violence.

However, the attacks do affect the public, and some leaders (and candidates for office) are proposing drastic and discriminatory policies to try and keep people safe, such as screening immigration by religion or turning away refugees displaced by the war in Syria.

“The real issue is the sense of insecurity and fear this creates and the price we pay as citizens,” he said.

“It seems we are willing to give up more and more personal freedoms to get security.”

Another student said that if Americans had more education about foreign cultures and religions, it would help to create more understanding and less fear.

“When people see something that is different ... they get scared and they get really defensive,” she said.

Several of the faculty members addressed ISIS’s relationship with the Islamic faith.

Eric Tuten, assistant professor of history, said that ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is a self-proclaimed caliph, or the worldwide leader of the Islamic faith.

There has not been a caliphate government in the world since 1924, shortly after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, he said.

Noorbakhsh said that the leaders of ISIS follow a radical ideology based on a fundamentalist readings of old scriptures.

“It’s trying to go back to its roots and revive an idea from 800, 900 years ago, when there was an empire,” he said.

Cindy LaCom, an English professor, said that the ideas and actions of ISIS are a “gross misrepresentation of Islam,” a religion that has 1.8 billion members in the world. However, in the media there is often a “collapse” where all Muslim people are grouped together, which is unfair to the majority of people, who do not agree with ISIS, she said.

LaCom said that actions taken to attempt to destabilize ISIS economically may not work because it can generate revenue by taxing, or extorting, its residents, selling oil and selling antiquities.

“So much revenue is being generated internally, something like sanctions isn’t really going to work,” she said.

Casson added that 13 months of air strikes carried out by the U.S. has not yielded results, though Obama recently approved 50 U.S. troops to assist a Turkish effort to target “high value targets.”

Casson said that he and his colleagues talk about the events in the Middle East frequently in class, even in subjects that don’t necessarily cover that region.