Confirming what everyone already knows, 54-year-old FBI Director James Comey told the Aspen Security Forum July 22 that Islamic State of Iraq and Syria poses a bigger threat to U.S. national security than al-Qaeda. Once public enemy No. 1, Osama bin Laden met his long-awaited end May 2, 2011, when Navy Seal Team 6 took him out in his walled compound in Abbottsbad, Pakistan. While al-Qaeada’s leadership passed to former Muslim Brotherhood leader 64-year-old Egyptian-born physician Ayman al-Zawahri, Comey confirmed that ISIS now represents the biggest threat to U.S. national security. Led by reclusive 42-year-old cleric Abu Bakr al-Bagdadi, ISIS has a different, less dramatic strategy than al-Qaeda. Bin Laden stunned the world Sept. 11, 2001, hijacking four U.S. jetliners, flying two into the World Trade Centers, one into the Pentagon and another in Shanksville, Penn.
Comey confirmed how ISIS’s strategy differs from al-Qaeda, working through the Internet to recruit, convert and brainwash disgruntled youths to become programmed assassins for worldwide jihad. But unlike al-Qaeda, ISIS focuses on recruiting disgruntled youth through social media, finding limitless recruits to attack soft Western targets in foreign lands halfway around the globe from the war zones in Iraq and Syria. Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez’s July 16 attack on unarmed strip-mall marine and navy recruiting offices killing five highlights ISIS’s new strategy. Comey admitted in Aspen it’s difficult to estimate how many foreign nationals or U.S. citizens have been recruited to join ISIS’s jihad. Comey confirmed ISIS’s social media recruiters encourage recruits to “kill where you are,” raising serious questions for President Barack Obama’s current air war against ISIS.
Comey points out that as long as ISIS continues to expand, grab territory and assert dominion over parts of Syria and Iraq, it’s going to be a formidable global terror force. Estimated that some 21,000 English-speaking ISIS followers around the glob, Comey pointed to unknown numbers in the U.S. Without giving details, Comey hinted the FBI detained scores of potential terrorists, intercepting terror plots before the July 4 holiday. With all U.S. law enforcement on the lookout July 4, terror cells like to strike when the guard went down after the holiday. FBI officials haven’t yet confirmed that Adulazeez was a confirmed radical yet the act speaks for itself. Born in Kuwait of Jordanian descent, Abdulazeez had a similar story to the Boston Marathon bombing Tsarnaev brothers. Picking military soft target recruiting centers spoke volumes of Abdulazeez’s actual motives.
Watching foreign nationals and locals recruited, inspired by ISIS or other Islamic extremist groups speaks volumes about the clout ISIS commands seizing some 30% of Iraq and Syria. When al-Baghdadi declared himself the leader of the new worldwide Islamic caliphate July 1, 2014, recruiting went through the roof. Carefully branding the group with slick black flags, banners and slogans differentiates ISIS from other Islamic terror groups. Recruits see firsthand in convincing fashion ISIS’s artifacts proving what looks like its permanent existence. Comey’s the first U.S. law enforcement official to admit that many of ISIS’s recruits are drug addicts, alcoholics or suffer from various types of mental illness. “The people the Islamic State [using al-Baghdadi’s label] is trying to reach are people that al-Qaeda would never use as an operative, because they are often unstable, troubled drug-users,” Comey said.
Comey’s alarm about the extent of ISIS’s reach into every neighborhood in the U.S. and around the globe has fallen on deaf ears at the White House. Instead of admitting the magnitude of the problem, President Barack Obama has refused to consider the necessity of putting U.S. boots on the ground in Iraq and Syria. Watching Iranian-backed groups like Hezbollah, regarded a terror group by the State Department and Israel, fight ISIS on the ground in Syria, shows just how far off base the White House counterterrorism strategy. Obama reluctantly started an air campaign in Syria Sept. 23, 2014, refusing to put boots on the ground. After spending some $2 billion Iraq and losing 4,491 U.S. troops, Obama refuses to put boots-on-the-ground, preferring to see locals do the heavy lifting. Comey reminds Obama that whatever happened in the past, ISIS is a real U.S. national security problem.
As long at ISIS raises its flag in Iraq and Syria, it will aggressively recruit vulnerable youth around the globe. Capturing land, holding key Iraq and Syria cities and waving its own banner in formerly Iraqi and Syrian territory proves to potential recruits the terror group’s legitimacy. Proving that U.S. counterterrorism strategy is in chaos, Matt Olsen, former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, told Congress Sept. 3, 2014 that he had “no credible information that ISIL [aka ISIS and IS], is preparing to attack the United States.” With Abdulazeez killing four marines and one sailor July 16, Obama’s current counterterrorism strategy must be reassessed. Letting ISIS seize 30% of Iraq and Syria and morph into the world’s most menacing terror group shows the failure of the Obama policy. Whether anyone wants or put boots-on-the-ground in Iraq and Syria or not, the U.S. has no real choice.
