ISIS TERROR WAVE
‘Crushed’ fiends will head to Western nations, FBI warns
AN UNPRECEDENTED wave of Islamic State fighters will flow into Western nations as the terror group loses ground in Syria and Iraq, FBI Director James Comey said Tuesday.
He told a Senate panel that once ISIS’ self-styled caliphate becomes “crushed,” terrorists bent on attacking the West will stream out of the region.
“There will be a terrorist diaspora sometime in the next two to five years like we’ve never seen before,” Comey said.
The ominous warning was delivered at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing focused on threats 15 years after the 9/11 attacks.
Comey said the number of Americans traveling to Syria to join ISIS jihadists has slowed to a trickle over the last year.
But Nicholas Rasmussen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said intelligence officials remain deeply concerned about the potential for attacks spawned by Al Qaeda and its affiliates.
The committee’s chairman, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), noted in prepared remarks that the U.S. has seen a spike in attacks carried out by Muslim extremists. “In all, Islamic extremist terrorist have killed 63 people on U.S. soil since our committee last held its annual hearing to consider threats to the homeland,” he said.
The congressman singled out the deadly attacks in San Bernardino, Calif., and Orlando as well as the Sept. 17 bombing in Chelsea that injured 31 people.
Comey said the FBI was planning to review its previous investigation into accused Chelsea bomber Ahmad Rahami, 28.
Rahami’s father, Mohammad, has insisted he told the FBI to “keep an eye” on his son.
The FBI has confirmed it opened a probe into Rahami in 2014, but came up with nothing.
Officials say the naturalized U.S. citizen traveled that same year to his native Afghanistan, where he likely became radicalized.
“We’re going to go back and look very carefully about the way we encountered him,” Comey said.
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson told the committee that in recent months, his agency set up a working group to crack down on smuggling groups bringing Middle Eastern migrants across the southern U.S. border.
He said the group collaborates with law enforcement in Central and South America to “interdict these people before they get to our border and share intelligence about what we’re seeing.” SYRIAN government forces captured a central rebel-held neighborhood in Aleppo on Tuesday after a week of blistering air strikes, as a military official vowed the offensive would continue until insurgents are “wiped out.” Syrian state TV said troops captured Farafra, near Aleppo’s central citadel, and that fighting was underway near the historic core of the northern city. Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and former commercial center, has been fiercely contested since rebels captured several eastern neighborhoods in 2012. Those neighborhoods are now under siege, and over the past week have endured the worst aerial onslaught since the start of the war, with more than 200 people killed and several buildings flattened.