Terror threat turns 'homegrown'

Fifteen years after the Sept 11, 2001 attacks, US anti-terror officials said the country is hardened against such well-developed plots but remains as vulnerable as ever to small and especially homegrown attacks.

Counterterror operations are under huge pressure to uncover and disrupt plots by sympathizers of the Islamic State group and al-Qaida hidden by less centralized networks and new communications technologies, they said.

"Our job is getting harder," said Nick Rasmussen, the powerful director of the National Counterterrorism Center, at a stocktaking this week in Washington.

The explosion of ways extremists can communicate with each other, many of them via popular smartphone apps with easy access to powerful encryption, "gives them the edge" against the US intelligence community, he said.

The 9/11 attacks gave birth to the US War On Terror, which initially focused on al-Qaida and the Taliban.

But 15 years later, the target is a different group, the Islamic State, which has seized territory in Syria and Iraq and shown the ability to plan and inspire homegrown attacks in Europe and the United States, smaller-scale than 9/11 but nevertheless deadly and demoralizing.

Meanwhile, al-Qaida still exists without former leader Osama bin Laden, with affiliates, spinoffs and rivals of both groups operating from the Philippines to West Africa, posing a more complex threat.

"The reality is that it has metastasized" from the Iraq-Syria region, said Frank Cilluffo, director of the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University.

"The threat persists and is in some cases more complex."

A series of surprise attacks have placed "HVEs" - homegrown violent extremist - as much in the focus of intelligence agencies as threats from abroad.

Among them, a 29-year-old US citizen of Afghan descent believed to hold radical Islamic sympathies shot dead 49 people in an Orlando nightclub in June.

And in December, a US-born man and his wife killed 14 at a Christmas party in San Bernardino, California.

The George Washington University Program on Extremism counts 102 people who have been charged in the US with offenses related to the IS group, many of them lured online.

US intelligence is strained by the more than 1,000 cases of possible extremists it is following, Rasmussen said. Moreover, plots are now developed and carried out much more rapidly, and in smaller networks, making it much harder for counterterror operations to discover them.

(China Daily 09/10/2016 page10)