Reuters Lebanon’s navy stopped a boat carrying 35 Palestinian refugees to Turkey on Friday, the second time this week it has moved …

Washington D.C., Oct 22, 2015 / 03:12 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Although numerous countries and organizations are working together and putting billions of dollars into relief efforts, “the scale of suffering has outpaced their ability to respond,” said Catholic Relief Services COO Sean Callahan.“Despite these generous responses, the exodus to Europe cries out that so much more must be done,” Callahan told members of Congress on Tuesday.

Over the last three years, Catholic Relief Services and their partners have assisted nearly 800,000 people and spent over $110 million in response to the Syrian refugee crisis. Churches, NGOs, and neighboring countries such as Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan have leant a helping hand to refugees.

Pamela Engel

Most of what's reported about jihadist fighters in terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda focuses on their military activities, and it's not often that we get a look behind the scenes at other aspect of these communities.

Thomas Hegghammer, an expert on violent Islamism at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, gave a lecture at the University of St. Andrews in April about what jihadis do in their spare time.

And Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a Middle East expert, tweeted that the transcript is one of the best things he's read in months.

Hegghammer called downtime activities that knit jihadi communities together "one of the last major, unexplored frontiers of terrorism research" that could "shed important new light on how extremists think and behave."

"I can’t quantify it, but it seems most non-military activities were orthodox devotional practices: prayer, invocations, ablution (washing yourself), Quran recitation, and the like," Hegghammer said.

"I found no support for the claim you sometimes hear about jihadists being hypocritical opportunists who don’t really care about religion. Some of them may have been unobservant before they join, but once they’re in, they seem very meticulous about observance."

This is supported by ISIS members' active presence on social media. Members discuss religious practices and make frequent references to Allah.