Terrorism’s ‘unknown unknowns’
The terrorism warning light may not be flashing bright red, but it’s certainly blinking again, with senior officials concerned about a possible attack inspired by an offshoot of the Islamic State group or perhaps by the IsraelHamas war or simply because the US’ porous southern border could offer a pathway to mayhem.
A chilling assessment came from FBI Director Christopher A. Wray in an interview with NBC News recently. “As I look back over my career in law enforcement, I’m hard-pressed to come up with a time when I’ve seen so many different threats, all elevated, all at the same time.” He said concerns were rising before Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel, but since then “it’s gone to a whole other level.”
Wray told the US Congress that he worried that lone-wolf extremists or small groups could draw “twisted inspiration” from events in the Middle East. He added that “the potential for a coordinated attack” like the rampage by the group known as Islamic State Khorasan, the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate terror, at a Moscow auditorium in March was “increasingly concerning.” What keeps him awake, he observed in a speech this month at Vanderbilt University, are what former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called “unknown unknowns.”
Wray’s comments haven’t gotten much public attention, perhaps because there are so many other worries this election year. For what it’s worth, my sense is that domestic political threats to our republic these days outweigh the danger of foreign terrorism. But forewarned is forearmed, so I’ve been asking officials across the government to share their assessment of current terrorism risks.
The concern over Islamic State Khorasan — also known as ISISK — is intense enough that the National Security Council held a “principals committee” meeting to discuss the subject. A senior Biden administration official summarized the situation this way in an email: “There is no current evidence of a credible plot. We are extremely vigilant about the potential risk given the evolving threat landscape.”
Officials at several agencies say there’s new focus on Islamic State Khorasan. The officials say that when the Taliban rulers in Kabul drove rival Islamic State Khorasan leaders last year to neighboring Central Asian states like Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, it “changed the dynamics of how they operate,” as one counterterrorism official put it. Now, those leaders “are playing the long game, and fairly successfully,” another US official said.
Islamic State Khorasan has recruited Tajik migrants working in Russia and Iran for major terrorist attacks in both countries. A January bombing in Kerman killed 95 Iranians, and the March attack at Moscow’s Crocus City Hall killed more than 140 Russians. The US, with its extraordinary surveillance capabilities, was able to warn both Iran and Russia that such attacks were planned — but to no avail. “We are victim agnostic,” one US official said, explaining the “duty to warn” about terrorist plots.
The intelligence community fears that Islamic State Khorasan could use this Central Asian diaspora to mount similar attacks in Europe or the United States. The group “is reshaping its propaganda to reach this target” of emigres, noted the counterterrorism official. Officials see the raw ingredients for an attack, rather than specific plans.
Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla, the Central Command leader, warned a House committee on March 7 that “lack of sustained pressure allowed ISIS-K to regenerate and harden their networks, creating multiple redundant nodes that direct, enable and inspire attacks.”
The pool of potential Islamic State Khorasan recruits or lonewolf actors in the United States is impossible to calculate. But a senior official of the Department of Homeland Security told me that over the past 12 months, as many as 50 Central Asian migrants a day have entered the US, and that the total flow this past year is more than 10,000. The DHS official said the vast majority were “legitimate asylum seekers” and that many passed through ports of entry, but some crossed the border illegally.
“We have a thorough screening and vetting process at the border that checks names and other information against classified databases to see if anyone is connected to a network that may pose concern,” the senior DHS official explained. DHS has organized several “repatriation flights” to Uzbekistan recently as the number of undocumented Central Asian migrants has increased, the official said.
The Israel-Hamas war adds a final combustible element. Wray’s concern about “unknown unknowns” is a good description of the perilous terrain ahead.
Gen. John Abizaid, then commander of US forces in the Middle East, warned more than 20 years ago that the US faced a “long war” against Islamic extremism that might last decades. That sense of conflict has ebbed and flowed since then; it lured an anxious America into two unwise wars and led successive presidents to try, in vain, to reduce our exposure in the Middle East. But the long war is still with us.
Follow David Ignatius @IgnatiusPost on X (formerly Twitter). The views expressed here are the writer’s own. — Ed.
(Washington Post Writers Group)