THE top US intelligence official said on Tuesday, Feb. 9 that ISIS was likely to attempt direct attacks on the US through the coming year, and that the group was infiltrating refugees escaping from Iraq and Syria to move across borders.
“[ISIS] will probably attempt to conduct additional attacks in Europe, and attempt to direct attacks on the U.S. homeland in 2016,” Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, testified in a security conference on Capitol Hill Tuesday.
Stewart linked his warning to the extremist group’s growing network of “emerging branches” in Mali, Tunisia, Somalia, Indonesia, and Bangladesh, according to Reuters, and added that ISIS is likely stepping up its “pace and lethality.”
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, also present at the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, estimated in his “Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community” report that violent extremists were “active in about 40 countries,” and that there are currently “more terrorist safe havens than at any time in history.”
ISIS and its eight branches were the No. 1 terrorist threat to the US, and it was using the refugee exodus from violence in Iraq and Syria to hide among innocent civilians and outreach other countries, Clapper warned.
He added that ISIS was “taking advantage of the torrent of migrants to insert operatives into that flow,” and said they were “pretty skilled at phony passports so they can travel ostensibly as legitimate travelers.”
ISIS fighters have reportedly seized Syrian passport facilities with machines that of manufacture realistic-looking passports, according to CNN.
The Defense Intelligence Agency also confirmed that ISIS bas succeeded in making and deploying toxic chemical weapons in Iraq and Syria, the first such attack by an extremist group in over two decades, since a chemical warfare attack in Japan in 1995, reported Fox News.
Clapper’s assessment also notes that “approximately five dozen” people linked to ISIS were arrested in the US last year.
The Islamic State has as many as 25,000 fighters in Syria and Iraq, down from a previous estimate of up to 31,000, an intelligence report revealed. Over 36,500 foreign fighters, including at least 6,600 from Western countries, have also traveled to Syria from more than 100 countries since 2012, the report states.
“Daesh [a derisive Arabic acronym for the Islamic State] is likely to increase the pace and lethality of its transnational attacks because it seeks to unleash violent actions and to provoke a harsh reaction from the West, thereby feeding its distorted narrative of a Western war against Islam,” said Stewart.
On the counter-ISIS campaign in Iraq and Syria, Stewart added it was “unlikely” that the Iraqi city of Mosul would be liberated in 2016.
While the National Intelligence assessment calls ISIS the “preeminent terrorist threat,” it also affirms that “al Qaeda affiliates are positioned to make gains in 2016.”
Al Qaida, based in Yemen in the Arabian Peninsula, and Al Nusra Front in Syria were named the “most capable al Qaeda branches.”
“These threats are exacerbated by the security challenges of the Middle East, which is now facing one of the most dangerous and unpredictable periods in the last decade,” Stewart said.
“The perceived success of attacks by homegrown violent extremists in Europe and North America, such as those in Chattanooga and San Bernardino, might motivate others to replicate opportunistic attacks with little or no warning, diminishing our ability to detect terrorist operational planning and readiness,” Clapper noted.
“ISIL involvement in homeland attack activity will probably continue to involve those who draw inspiration from the group’s highly sophisticated media without direct guidance from ISIL leadership.”
