You’ve likely heard that singer Taylor Swift recently cancelled three concerts in Vienna after Austrian police foiled a terrorist plot to attack fans outside the arena and “kill as many people as possible”. You’ve also likely heard that at least one of the teenaged plotters was allegedly radicalized by Islamic State (ISIS) and al-Qaida propaganda. What you likely haven’t heard most in the media mention is the increasing threats to the U.S. homeland posed by such groups, which are exacerbated by the administration’s feckless migrant-release policies at the unsecure Southwest border.
ISIS’s al-Qaida Roots. ISIS and al-Qaida share a common bloody history.
As I explained back in April, it all starts with Jordanian-born Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who founded an al-Qaeda offshoot, “al Qaeda in Iraq” or “AQI”, way back in 2004.
As a former CIA analyst tasked with tracking the terror mastermind explained to PBS’ Frontline in 2016, Zarqawi’s “initial focus was being empathetic for the Palestinian cause”, and his first target was the Jordanian government, which he believed was oppressing Palestinians.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq, however, appears to have shifted Zarqawi’s “vision”, focusing it on establishing an Islamic caliphate in that country with the assistance of a Sunni coalition of former Iraqi military and foreign fighters opposed to the U.S. occupation.
Zarqawi himself was killed in a U.S. attack in 2006, and AQI fell victim to its own brutal tactics (which alienated many of its would-be adherents), but the group quickly reinvented itself as Islamic State of Iraq, “IS”.
A 2007 U.S. military surge managed to undermine the new group’s effectiveness, but ongoing sectarian strife in majority-Shia Iraq and instability in Syria provided an opening for it to engage in yet another 2013 rebranding as “Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant”, known variously as “Daesh”, “ISIS”, or “ISIL”.
In June 2014, ISIL declared an Islamic caliphate in a vast region of western Iraq and Syria under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, headquartered in the Syrian city of Raqqa, at which point the story gets complicated.
SDF, Iran, Russia, and Turkey — in Syria. The United States and a coalition of Western and various Arab countries (notably Saudi Arabia) supports an oppositionist group in Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), one of whose goals is opposing ISIL. SDF was originally founded by local Kurds who opposed the government of Bashar al-Assad, which has been supported by Iran (since 2012) and Russia (since 2015).
In October 2019, the Trump administration withdrew U.S. troops from the area, but shortly thereafter attacked al-Baghdadi in an airstrike (likely using SDF intelligence). The ISIS leader killed himself and three of his children to avoid capture by U.S. Special Operations Forces, who invaded his compound.
The next month, Trump sent troops back to the region to protect oil fields from falling into ISIS hands. Today, there are about 900 U.S. servicemembers in Syria, and on August 9, an undisclosed number of them were injured in a drone attack on the Rumalyn Landing Zone, just days after four U.S. troops and a contractor were injured in a rocket attack on al-Asad air base in Iraq.
Both attacks are believed to have been carried out by Iranian-backed groups, though there has been no official confirmation.
Also last week, “several Syrian pro-government and pro-Iranian groups launched a major attack against” SDF, reportedly due to tensions between the group and the local Arab population (which accuses SDF of “illegally occupying their land and stealing the resources”).
By the way, the nominally pro-Western government of NATO member Turkey also opposes SDF, largely due to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s concerns about a Kurdish-led group so close to his country’s borders. There is little love lost between the Turkish government and the Kurds, a story for another day.
In any event, the Institute for the Study of War explained in an August 2023 paper that the Syrian-Iranian-Russian coalition is actively attempting to push the United States out of Syria, even while opposing the ongoing ISIS threat.
Did I mention this was all complicated? And I’ve only just started.
ISIS-K. Around 2014, a group of disaffected al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan formed ISIS-K, pledging loyalty to the ISIS effort then gaining ground in Iraq and Syria. As NPR has explained, “[T]he group has sought to distinguish itself among jihadi fighters by adopting a radical Islamic worldview more militant and uncompromising than its rivals.”
ISIS-K has already launched a major attack against U.S. troops. During the U.S. calamitous withdrawal from Kabul in August 2021, suicide bombers from the group set off explosions outside Hamid Karzai International Airport, killing 13 U.S. service members and approximately 150 Afghan civilians.
Then, in January, the group took responsibility for two bombings that killed and wounded hundreds who were commemorating the third anniversary of the death (in a U.S. airstrike) of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, leader of the Quds Force of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in Kerman, Iran.
Thereafter, in March, the group claimed credit for an attack on the Crocus City Hall, a public venue near Moscow, where four assailants opened fire during a concert that killed more than 140 and wounded countless others.
The current head of ISIS-K is 29-year-old Sanaullah Ghafari, aka: Shahab al-Muhajir. The U.S. State Department has a $10 million bounty on his head, but good luck collecting it: Ghafari lived in Kabul after U.S. forces left, but even the Taliban doesn’t care much for him and he’s since reportedly decamped to Pakistan’s “lawless Balochistan border province”.
Still, in the power vacuum created by the United States’ departure from Afghanistan, ISIS-K has “gained substantial strength” and “more recently has ramped up its international activity”, according to the Financial Times.
In discussing Joe Biden’s decades-long foreign relations performance prior to becoming president, Robert Gates, President Obama’s first secretary of Defense, famously noted: “He has been wrong on nearly every major issue.” All this only serves to confirm that assessment.
“ISIS-Inspired Suspect Planned Suicide Attack at Taylor Swift Concert”. Which brings me back to the alleged planned attack on the Taylor Swift concerts in Vienna.
As CNN reported on August 8, information from unnamed “foreign intelligence sources” led investigators to a cache of “chemicals, explosive devices, detonators and 21,000 euros in counterfeit cash at the home of the main suspect, a 19-year-old ISIS sympathizer who had been radicalized online”.
There were apparently three suspected plotters, aged 19, 17, and 15. Due to their youth, Austrian officials have not disclosed much about any of them, but CNN described them as “Austrian-born with either Turkish, North Macedonian or Croatian backgrounds”.
In response to that foiled attack, UN Undersecretary for Counterterrorism Vladimir Vorokov identified ISIS-K (to which the oldest plotter had pledged allegiance) as “the greatest external terrorist threat” to Europe.
What about the ISIS Threat to the U.S. Homeland? Europe is one thing, but what about the ISIS threat to the United States, and more specifically, the U.S. homeland?
On the one hand, days before the Crocus attack, Gen. Michael Kurilla, leader of U.S. Central Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “ISIS-K ... is rapidly developing the ability to conduct ‘external operations’ in Europe and Asia”, but “will not be able to strike the U.S. homeland in the near future”.
Days after that attack, however, Max Abrahms, associate professor of political science at Northeastern University, opined:
The United States would be considered a very juicy target for ISIS and any of its affiliates or supporters around the world. I suspect it’s just a matter of time before there is another ISIS attack in the United States.
While the alleged Swift attack was planned for Vienna, it’s difficult not to view it as aimed at the United States, as well. As Seth Jones, director of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, explained in the Wall Street Journal: “Dozens of Americans — including teenage girls — could have been killed and wounded. The next time, we may not be as fortunate.”
Which brings me to the Southwest border, and more specifically to the feckless migrant-release program the Biden-Harris administration has been running there for the last three-plus years.
By my conservative estimates, 88.5 percent of all illegal migrants encountered by CBP there (more than four million aliens) have been released into the United States under the current administration, a figure that doesn’t include two million others who evaded apprehension and entered illegally, known as “got-aways”.
In March, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned the Senate that “dangerous persons” were among those crossing the border, and further explained:
Even before [the Hamas attack on Israel on] October 7, I would have told this committee that we were at a heightened threat level from a terrorism perspective ... . The threats from homegrown violent extremists that is jihadist-inspired, extremists, domestic violent extremists, foreign terrorist organizations, and state-sponsored terrorist organizations all being elevated at one time since October 7, though, that threat has gone to a whole other level. And so, this is a time I think for much greater vigilance, maybe been called upon us.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) specifically asked about the ISIS threat at the border, to which Wray responded:
So, I want to be a little bit careful about how far I can go in open session, but there is a particular network that has, where some of the overseas facilitators of the smuggling network have ISIS ties that we’re very concerned about and that we’ve been spending enormous amount of effort with our partners that we’re investigating.
In June, Wray again warned the Senate about such threats, explaining that his bureau had seen a “rogues gallery” of foreign terror groups calling for attacks on this country and arguing that:
Given those calls for action, our most immediate concern has been that individuals or small groups will draw a twisted inspiration from the events in the Middle East to carry out attacks here at home ... . But now, on top of that, increasingly concerning is the potential for a coordinated attack here in the homeland, not unlike the ISIS-K attack we saw at the [Crocus] Russian concert hall back in March.
That’s particularly concerning given that a recent report from the House Judiciary Committee (which I discussed on August 8) noted that ICE had arrested eight Tajik nationals “with potential ISIS ties” in June. Of those eight:
three were released into the country after using the Biden-Harris-Administration’s CBP One phone application to schedule an appointment at a port of entry, four were initially encountered by Border Patrol while crossing the border, and one arrived at a port of entry without scheduling a CBP One app appointment.
Given that, as I explained at the end of June, ICE was looking for 50 migrants smuggled into the United States “by an ISIS-affiliated human smuggling network”, it’s not clear whether DHS has found them all.
That Judiciary report continued: “Just last year, however, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas boasted about the vetting capabilities through the CBP One app, claiming the app ‘[a]llows [DHS] to screen and vet individuals before they arrive at our border.”
Needless to say, the release of the three Tajiks who scheduled CBP One port appointments calls that claim into question, which is problematic given that the agency currently makes 1,450 such interview slots available daily, and that nearly 96 percent of interviewees are paroled into the United States.
There haven’t been any major terrorist attacks on the homeland since September 11th, likely creating a blank space in Americans’ collective memory. The foiled ISIS-inspired terrorist attack on Taylor Swift’s planned Vienna concerts reveals that now’s not the time to shake off terror concerns, particularly given the administration’s migrant-release policies and increased threats from adversaries near and far.
Photo by Eva Rinaldi/Creative Commons