Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes was forced several times today to clarify a comment made by President Obama that aired Friday morning hours before ISIS terrorists murdered more than 125 in Paris.

'I don't think they're gaining strength,' Obama had said of the terrorist organization on Good Morning America. 'What is true is that from the start our goal has been first to contain them and we have contained them.'

Contained, said Rhodes, was simply meant in terms of geography.

'The president was responding very specifically to the geographic expansion of ISIL in Iraq and Syria,' Rhodes told ABC This Week host George Stephanopoulos.

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Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes had to clarify a comment made by President Obama, that ISIS had been contained, explaining that the president specifically was talking about containing the terrorist group in Iraq and Syria

Eating his words? President Obama, in an interview with ABC News this week, said that ISIS wasn't gaining strength and that the United States 'has contained them'

On Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace also brought up Obama's comments, asking Rhodes if the administration had 'profoundly misjudged' the ISIS threat in light of the violent Parisian attacks.

Rhodes noted that taking out ISIS would be a 'longterm challenge.'

'What the president was referring to very specifically was we had to stop their geographic advance in Iraq and Syria, where they were gaining more territory,' Rhodes said. 'We had done that.'

Rhodes pointed out that ISIS had been rolled back in Northern Iraq and Northern and Eastern Syria.

'That's necessary to shrink the space they operate in,' he said, noting that the fighters 'very much depend on their safe havens' in the two war-torn countries.

'But that does not eliminate the threat as you saw so tragically in Paris,' Rhodes said.

CNN's Jake Tapper, host of State of the Union, acted even more incredulous when posing questions to Rhodes.

Tapper brought up the president's comment about containment and then commented, 'If this is what ISIS looks like contained, I shudder to think what ISIS looks like uncontained.'

Rhodes talked about the importance of taking back ISIS territory pointing to how the United States took out the group's leader in Libya, as ISIS was also trying to plant a flag there.

'And we have to be one step ahead of ISIL every time, if we can,' Rhodes noted.

Tapper wasn't having it.

'One step ahead? We don't seem to be on step ahead of any terrorist group these days!' Tapper said. 'This is the worst atrocity in France since Hitler.'

Rhodes did say, however, that the administration considered Friday's atrocities in Paris 'an act of war by ISIL.'

France could invoke Article 5, a NATO clause that says an attack against one ally is an attack against all.

Rhodes said that decision will be left up to the French, but the United States would be supportive.