Trump says ISIS hit over NYC rampage
U.S. said to strike fighters in Somalia
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Friday that the U.S. military is attacking the Islamic State militant group “10 times harder” in response to Tuesday’s New York City truck attack, and later in the day, officials said the U.S. had conducted two airstrikes against Islamic State-affiliated fighters in Somalia.
It was not immediately clear whether the Somalia strikes were carried out as White House-directed retaliation for the truck attack that killed eight people.
The suspect in the New York attack, Sayfullo Saipov, told FBI interrogators that he was inspired by the Islamic State, and Trump wrote in a tweet that the group claimed Saipov as “their soldier.”
Trump tweeted: “Based on that, the Military has hit ISIS ‘much harder’ over the last two days. They will pay a big price for every attack on us!”
The Islamic State claimed the attack late Thursday, in al-Naba, the group’s weekly newspaper, according to SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist activity.
Asked about his tweet, Trump told reporters before he departed on his Asia trip, “What we’re doing is every time we’re attacked from this point forward — and it took place yesterday — we are hitting them 10 times harder. So when we have an animal do an attack like he did the other day on the west side of Manhattan, we are hitting them 10 times harder.”
The Somalia attack involved two airstrikes overnight, according to a U.S. official who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and so spoke on condition of anonymity. It was the first time the U.S. military has carried out airstrikes against Islamic State-affiliated fighters in Somalia, where the group is a growing presence.
Asked about Trump’s assertion that the military is striking the Islamic State “10 times harder,” the Pentagon issued a brief statement saying the U.S. continues to strike the Islamic State, along with al-Qaida and other like-minded extremist groups, “wherever they are globally and at a time of our choosing.”
The military, in its daily rundown Friday of U.S. and coalition airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria, reported nine strikes in Syria on Thursday and four in Iraq. That is consistent with strike levels throughout this week.
Trump’s “10 times harder” vow comes as the Islamic State’s two declared capitals, Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq, already have fallen. The U.S. military is still focusing on the Islamic State in Syria’s Euphrates River valley, but it’s in an area in which involvement by forces aligned with the Syrian regime complicates fighting.
Army Maj. Gen. James Jarrard, commander of the U.S.led special operations joint task force fighting the Islamic State, said in a news briefing Tuesday that there are probably somewhere between 3,000 and 7,000 Islamic State fighters left throughout the Euphrates River valley, from Deir el-Zour in Syria to Qaim in Iraq.
Federal authorities charged Saipov, a 29-year-old Uzbek immigrant, with carrying out the attack Tuesday, saying it appears he was radicalized online sometime after coming to the United States in 2010. They say he chose Halloween to inflict maximum carnage, and he could potentially face the death penalty.
The New York Police Desaid partment said authorities continued Friday to sift leads in the case as they investigated the attack.
“A lot of due diligence to do, going backwards through friends, associates, phone records, Internet contacts,” said John Miller, the department’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism.
The FBI on Friday interviewed Mokhammadzokir Kadirov, 32, for four hours in New Jersey. A person with knowledge of the interview, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Kadirov was being treated as a witness in the case, and that the questions revolved around his relationship with Saipov.
The nature of that relationship mostly remained unclear, though both appear to have worked for Uber. Kadirov released a statement that said in part, “We as Muslims completely reject this kind of actions.”
The FBI declined to comment on the interview.
The Islamic State’s claim of responsibility fell short of asserting that the group had coordinated or directed the attack.
The group has claimed credit in the past for terrorist attacks committed by people who were inspired by its propaganda efforts but did not have any direct connections
to anyone in the organization. It also asserted responsibility for the Las Vegas shooting rampage last month, although American authorities quickly dismissed that.
Authorities said the suspect in Tuesday’s attack appeared to have closely hewed to the Islamic State’s guidance for carrying out such attacks. Saipov “appears to have followed almost exactly to a T the instructions that ISIS has put out in its social media channels,” Miller said during an earlier briefing, using an acronym to refer to the Islamic State.
Among other things, Miller said, that included leaving behind notes declaring his allegiance. Court papers say one note, written in Arabic, could be translated in part to read: “Islamic Supplication. It will endure.”
After rampaging through the bike path in a rented Home Depot truck, police said, Saipov crashed into a school bus and got out. A police officer called to the scene shot and wounded him, and Saipov remains hospitalized. Authorities said Saipov expressed pride in what happened and asked if he could display an Islamic State flag in his hospital room.
As people gathered Friday for prayers at a mosque near where Saipov lived in Paterson, N.J., some in the Muslim community there were preparing for a steep escalation in threats since the attack.
The Islamic Center of Passaic County said it had received eight threatening phone calls Wednesday and Thursday. Officials there notified the Paterson Police Department, which told the center that it was investigating the threats.
“We haven’t seen anything of this magnitude,” said a woman who worked for several years at the center and declined to give her name out of fear for her safety.
Hasan Husein, an interpreter for the imam at the Masjid Omar Mosque in Paterson, which is next to the apartment where Saipov lived, said threatening callers contacted his mosque this week, too. The mosque reported them to the police.
“Quite a few calls,” Husein
after Friday’s afternoon prayer. “Bad words and ‘Go back to your country.’”
New York officials, meanwhile, were gearing up for the New York City Marathon on Sunday, for which they promised an unprecedented security effort to secure a soft target spanning five boroughs and 26.2 miles.
The security detail will include hundreds of extra uniformed patrol and plainclothes officers, roving teams of counterterrorism commandos armed with heavy weapons, bomb-sniffing dogs and rooftop snipers poised to shoot if a threat emerges.
The Police Department is also turning to a tactic it has used to protect Trump Tower and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade: 16-ton sanitation trucks filled with sand. The trucks, along with “blocker cars,” will be positioned at key intersections to prevent anyone from driving onto the course.
Marathoners from around the world who have been streaming into the city in anticipation of the race expressed mixed feelings about running so soon after the carnage.
“I can be really scared of it when I am at home and in front of the TV,” Annemerel de Jongh, 28, of The Hague, Netherlands, said Thursday as she picked up her race number at a Manhattan convention center. “But when I am running I feel maybe a little bit invincible, like nothing can happen to me. I can run away from it.”