U.S. will remain Islamic State target

Top U.S. intel chief sets out ‘litany of doom’

The Islamic State group continues to take advantage of weak and collapsing governments to expand its reach, and remains determined to attack the United States, the top U.S. intelligence official told a Senate panel Tuesday.

Islamic State, which controls large swaths of northern Iraq and eastern Syria, has become the “preeminent global threat,” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the Senate Armed Services Committee during the annual “worldwide threats” hearing.

In what he described as a “litany of doom,” Clapper ran down a diverse list of threats facing the U.S., including terrorism, cyberattacks sponsored by China and Russia, missile tests by Iran and continued enrichment of nuclear material by North Korea.

Spreading world instability has emboldened militants and rogue states, he said.

Violent extremists are active in about 40 nations, he said, including seven that are seeing a collapse of central government authority and 14 others threatened by instability.

“There are more crossborder military operations under way in the Middle East since any time since the 1973 Arab-Israeli War,” Clapper said, citing simultaneous conflicts in Iraq, Syria and Yemen as the type of unstable conditions Islamic State and other militant groups can use to expand, recruit and plot attacks against the U.S.

Intelligence officials are seeing signs that Islamic State continues to plot strikes in the U.S., and they fear copycat attackers will try to emulate last year’s deadly rampages in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and San Bernardino, California.

ALEX BRANDON ASSOCIATED PRESS Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (seated at table) tells the Senate Intelligence Committee’s annual “worldwide threat s” hearing that the Islamic State is the world’s top terrorism threat and will continue to target the U.S.