UNKNOWN NUMBER OF “HOMEGROWN” TERRORISTS
TRAINED IN
SYRIA AND IRAQ WITH ISIS OR AQAP
NYPD IN
CLOSE TOUCH WITH INTERPOL & OTHER ALLIES
The Kouachi
brother assassinate a French Police Officer outside the offices
of the satirical
magazine Charlie Hebdo last week
TAGS:
TERRORIST ATTACKS IN FRANCE, TERRORIST TRAINING IN
IRAQ,
SYRIA AND YEMEN, SMALL CELLS, LOOSE NETWORKS HALLMARKS OF
NEW
GENERATION OF EXTREMISTS, EUROPEAN UNION MEMBERS
VULNERABLE,
NYPD INTEL BUREAU ON HIGH ALERT
(Tuesday January 13, 2015, NY,
NY) The carnage in France at the Paris
office of a satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, was not about an offensive
cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad in a derogatory manner. Yes, the perpetrators may have made that
absurd claim just as they have launched attacks at other publications and journalists
they deemed to be “Enemies of Islam”. The
brief siege and bloodshed at a Kosher market as well as the murder of four Police
Officers in three separate incidents, one of whom ironically was a Muslim, were
more about creating terror for terrors sake then any cartoon.
We first tasted the bitter
pill of Islamic extremists here on February 26, 1993 when a small terror cell
based in Brooklyn managed to park a truck loaded with an explosive device on
the fourth subterranean level of the World Trade Center Plaza. The global reach of terrorism reached our
shores and has been here ever since although they have not managed to
perpetrate another mass casualty, mass fatality events since the attack on
September 11, 2001. Very quickly we were
forced to adapt to the new reality and could no longer believe the broad oceans
kept us immune from jihadists and
other radicals.
al QAEDA
1.0
The al Qaeda terrorist
organization the world was introduced to on September 11, 2001 has essentially
been significantly degraded and largely eradicated. In the wake of 9-11-01 we dispatched CIA
operatives and Special Forces into their safe haven granted by the ruling
Taliban in Afghanistan and quickly had those who remained trapped in the rugged
Hindu Kush border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan. As that campaign of asymmetrical warfare and
conventional United States military weaponry and tactics, particularly unrivaled
air superiority, the intelligence community was beginning to piece together all
of the many “dots” they had failed to connect prior to 9-11-01. Quickly the important role the exiled Saudi
son of a multimillionaire, Osama bin Laden emerged as did his motivation for previous attacks on United States
embassies in Africa and the US Navy ship the USS Cole as it sat docked in the
Port of Oman.
Bin Laden had been issuing
missives and fatwas from his safe
haven scattered throughout Afghanistan for many years. he had literally “declared war” on the United
States several times in recorded television interviews but he and his threats
were not taken seriously in the CIA or NSC.
Obviously, that was to our detriment and revelations and analysis
conducted throughout the last 13 years clearly illustrates that the
intelligence community and the Cheney/Bush Administration have blood, American
blood, on their hands.
But the trail begins farther
back to the Administration of President George H.W. Bush and Saddam Hussein’s
invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The Saudi’s
fearing the Iraqi army would easily plow through Kuwait and advance into Saudi
Arabia seeking help. Osama bin Laden
flew to Saudi Arabia and because of his family’s close ties with the House of
Saud, was granted a private meeting with top tier Saudi officials. Fresh off what he perceived as a huge
military victory for his mujahedin
forces who had routed the mighty Soviet Union’s military after almost 10 years
of bitter combat and retreated in defeat and disgrace, bin Laden offered the
services of his “troops” to defend the homeland, the sacred land that is home
to the all-important cities of Mecca and Medina. Osama could not bear the thought of having an
infidel army – the United States
military – occupying Saudi land while they fought to repel the possible Iraqi
invasion. The Saudi refusal of bin
Laden’s offer enraged him and he ultimately returned to Afghanistan after being
declared persona non grata in
Yemen.
The US military rapidly
expelled all Iraqi forces from Kuwait.
They also left behind several remote military bases and this was an
affront that bin Laden could not endure.
The thought of Americans on sacred soil with all their sinful ways was
the catalytic spark that ignited the embassy attacks and the USS Cole incident
and would ultimately culminate with the attack on 9-11-01.
Over the intervening years the
original al Qaeda network has been downgraded to a “brand” with small cells
functioning as “franchises”. Any group
that commits an act of terror on the West can claim their affiliation with al
Qaeda or the upstart bastardized off-shoot mutation al Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula (AQAP). Groups such as these
are decentralized, often living in member’s home countries after having
traveled to and received training in Iraq or Syria; Afghanistan and Yemen are
seeing a resurgence of al Qaeda 1.0 as well.
There is also the huge specter of “lone wolf” operatives, “copy-cat”
opportunists, and small cells very loosely connected if connected at all.
BASTARD STEPCHILDREN: AQAP AND ISIS
The emergence of the ultra-violent terrorist organization known as ISIS or ISIL was born in Syria as
a force determined to oust the despotic leader of that country Bashar al-Assad. They have developed into a significant
military presence equipped largely with the huge caches of weaponry the United
States left behind in Iraq as well as other USA supplied munitions intended for
the nascent Iraqi Defense Force and local police. Iraq is by anyone’s standards a “failed state”
and ISIS rapidly capitalized on the deterioration of that country gaining
substantial territorial assets largely through the unchecked use of barbarism
and savagery that has earned them the reputation that strikes fear in the
hearts of those unfortunate enough to have been in their path. Despite the US bombing campaign on some of
their strongholds in northern Iraq and southern Syria, they continue to fight
with Syrian troops still loyal to President al-Assad while simultaneously holding
on to the broad swathes of territory they have seized in the oil-rich northern
provinces in Iraq. They have effectively
obliterated the historical border between Iraq and Syria. We have seen their brutality as they have
beheaded captured hostages, raped, pillaged and destroyed the small communities
of Ankawa, Iraq, the predominantly Christian
suburb in the province of Erbil. In many
cases the members of these ancient sects were given the ultimatum to convert to
Islam or be killed.
While AQAP and ISIS share
little to nothing ideologically, they both have designs to lash out on the
western world and the United States. Both organizations actively recruit in
European countries and the USA. Those
called to jihad travel to Iraq and
Syria for terrorist training and afterwards are sent back to their homelands to
ply their newly acquired and honed skills in everything from assembling suicide
bombs and other IED’s, and small-scale assaults such as was seen last week in
France. AQAP and ISIS have proven to be
particularly adept at cyber warfare and the use of the Internet and social
media to attract followers as well as to orchestrate operations between small
cells unknown to each other. These are
classic hallmarks of the modern day version of asymmetrical warfare. They have also been able to penetrate some of
our government’s databases in well executed hacking operations. In many ways it is astounding that there are individuals
within AQAP and ISIS with sufficient cyber knowledge and acuity who’ve been
able to pull off such hacks. Once again
it seems as if the US intelligence community, military, Department of Homeland
Security, and the National Cyber Warfare Command are playing catch up with
these terrorist groups.
THE UNANSWERABLE QUESTIONS
That there exists an unknown
number of individuals, some loosely affiliated with larger groups or terrorist
networks reside in many European countries became bloodily evident with the attacks
in France. Some analysts have made the
point that the weapons used in those attacks are “military grade” and virtually
impossible to purchase in countries in the European Union (EU). For many this indicated the presence of
terrorists with connections to the war zones and the illegal market of underground
arms sales. This reality poses a special
threat to a country such as France with a significant Muslim population. The lax security in travelling between EU
countries also allows motivated individuals to travel unimpeded; provided they
are not on any country’s “watch list”, throughout the EU and to Iraq, Syria,
Yemen or any other location where terrorists conduct training.
There is no way to even guess
at the number of individuals who have gone abroad for terrorist training and
returned to their home countries to conduct mass casualty, mass fatality
events. Speaking with analysts and
experts in the US intelligence community including the elite NYPD Intelligence
Bureau, the CIA, FBI, and a source in the ATF, the overarching concern is that
there are so many important questions being asked that are basically
unanswerable or draw incomplete conclusions about the numbers of people in the
US, be they part of a gauzy network, lone wolves or copy-cats,that are somewhere “out
there” waiting for a signal or simply an internal urge to strike. The prospect of this unknown quantity in our
midst has local authorities, especially the NYPD on a high alert status. Some Intel operations that had been temporarily
halted have been reactivated.
Last Thursday NYPD Deputy Commissioner
of Intelligence and Counter-terrorism commented that the threat of a terrorist attack
in NYC “…has never gone away”. He
continued, “The new wrinkle is that groups like ISIS, while they have a less
sophisticated external planning operations node, have a much more sophisticated
and slick propaganda arm that is extolling people to do this without having
contact with the mother ship.”
ANYTIME, ANYWHERE
While a City such as New York
will always be a highly desirable “target rich environment” for terrorists of
every stripe, this new generation of terrorists are, at least for the time
being, comfortable to pull off smaller scaled operations; these operations in
some ways are as effective a method to achieving their means as a large scale
attack: they induce fear among local populations and gain significant publicity
the world over. This aides them not only
in striking a fatal blow to a target by also serves as an effective recruitment
tool and another venue through which they spread their propaganda to as large
an audience as possible. This is the
harsh fact of our times; American interests abroad are targets just as is our
homeland and we have already witnessed a few isolated attacks perpetrated here
by individuals claiming to be associated or at least with an affinity for
groups such as AQAP and ISIS.
Our best defense is a mixture
of offense, as in pro-active policing and intelligence gathering as well as maintaining
the highest levels of security at prominent and notable sites not only here in
NYC but all across the country.
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