Experts say homegrown extremists pose real danger to Europe, US
Threat from Daesh in Syria, Iraq continues
WASHINGTON: Returning fighters from the vanquished Daesh pose a grave danger to Europe and the US, but the primary extremist threat comes from people living and radicalized inside their country, US terror experts say.
Even if they have no battleground experience, those who decide to undertake solo attacks, like the two recently in New York, in the name of Daesh or Al-Qaeda are almost impossible to detect in advance.
“In France, the US, or elsewhere, there certainly won’t be any more large attacks planned from abroad like those of Nov. 13, 2015, in Paris,” said Marc Sageman, a former CIA agent and terror expert, referring to the multipronged Daesh operation that left 130 dead.
“Ever since then, attackers here or in Europe have not been guided by Daesh but acted on their own, imagining themselves to be soldiers of an imagined Islamic community which they want to defend or avenge.”
Neither Akayed Ullah, the Bangladeshi immigrant who tried to blow up a New York subway station last week, mainly wounding himself, nor Sayfullo Saipov, an Uzbek who mowed down people on a New York bike path on Oct. 31, killing eight, had any evident contact with Daesh terrorists aside from watching their propaganda videos.
Experts say that kind of self-radicalized attacker, completely unknown to authorities, is the main threat countries face today.
While returning Daesh fighters are definitely a threat, “it’s not a primary concern,” said Albert Ford of the New America think tank.
“The attacks in this country were made by people who were in the country for years. The real danger is with these not very sophisticated but deadly attacks that we saw lately in New York.”
According to New America data, 85 percent of the 415 people accused of extremist-related crimes in the US since the 9/11 attacks have been American citizens. Of them, 207 were born in the US.
They also were not known to law enforcement: Only one fourth had a police record.
“None of the deadly jihadist attacks in the United States since 2014 had a known operational connection to ISIS (Daesh) or its networks,” a New America report says.
On both sides of the Atlantic, homegrown attacks “are obviously the most dangerous,” echoed Thomas Sanderson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Transnational Threats Project.
“Of the 19 last major attacks in Europe, 17 did not have a direct foreign factor element to it.”
Homegrown attackers stay under the radar, giving little away that would alert police, Sanderson noted.
“Their safe haven is their bedrooms. They can prepare at home, they don’t need the footprint of a camp anywhere,” he said.
At the same time, experts say, the threat from Daesh in Syria and Iraq has not disappeared even if the group has been expelled from nearly all of the territory it held.
For those who survive, according to former US undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Michael Vickers, the war is not over.
“Defeating insurgencies always takes time. It ranges from ten years to multi decades. And this one is a global insurgency, with expanded space and expanded time,” he said.
Indeed, Daesh planned for battlefield losses and has a strategy for surviving, noted Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University national security expert.
“Two or three years before the Paris attacks, ISIS put in place an external operations network. This network extends beyond Europe,” he noted.
“The traction of that strategy was demonstrated last May when a bomb attack was committed in Manchester, England, against a concert venue. That attack was operated by an ISIS cell operating out of Benghazi, Libya.”
And the returnees, even if they stand a much higher chance of being spotted by police than selfradicalized homegrown attackers, are still part of that network, added Sanderson.
Even if returnees’ numbers have been low, he said: “The returning fighters present a massive potential problem because of the skills and the credibility and the motivation.”