ISIS now the ‘most urgent terrorist threat,’ says ex-Obama official

The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is now “most urgent terrorist threat” facing the United States, a former top Obama counterterrorism official said Wednesday.

“In short, ISIS’s proven intentions and increasing capability, as the Paris attacks reflect so starkly, warrant ranking the group as our most urgent terrorist threat,” said Matthew G. Olsen, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, at a joint House Foreign Affairs Committee and Homeland Security Committee hearing. 

{mosads}As recently as August, there was still a split amongst intelligence officials as to which was the greater threat to the homeland — ISIS or Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which has attempted attacks against the U.S. in the last several years. 

Olsen told the New York Times in August that he wouldn’t put ISIS “on a matter of scale as significant as what we faced 10 years ago from Al Qaeda, or even now from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula or the Khorasan Group, to carry out more significant, perhaps catastrophic, attacks.”

However, Olsen and other officials have also hedged, saying that small-scale attacks in the U.S. were more likely to be linked to ISIS, and larger-scale attacks more likely to be carried out by AQAP, al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen.  

Olsen said during the hearing on Wednesday that the Paris attacks reflect an “alarming trend” that has seen ISIS increase the “complexity, severity, and pace of its external attacks.” 

The Paris attacks were “not simply inspired by ISIS, but rather it appears they were ISIS-planned and directed,” he said. “[They] demonstrate ISIS’s expanding reach beyond its safe haven in Syria and Iraq.” 

The 41 ISIS or ISIS-inspired attacks against Western targets so far this year are already more than double the number of such attacks last year, Olsen said. 

Within the U.S., Olsen said there has been an uptick over the past year in the number of moderate-to-small scale plots by lone actors or insular groups, often self-directed or inspired by groups like ISIS. He said most of the homegrown violent extremist cases are connected to ISIS. 

Olsen said driving this trend is the number of Europeans and other Westerners who have gone to Syria to fight. Foreign fighters exceed 30,000, including as many or more than 4,000 Europeans and more than 250 Americans. 

“This ‘terrorist diaspora’ is a skip away from Europe — and a plane ride to the United States,” said House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.), in his opening remarks.  

Olsen said ISIS has also developed an “unprecedented ability” to communicate with its followers worldwide, attracting recruits through a sophisticated media and propaganda effort with multiple websites, Twitter feeds, YouTube channels and online chat rooms. 

At the same time, Olsen said it is “increasingly difficult for the intelligence community” to collect specific information on terrorist intentions and the status of development plots, citing disclosures by former government contractor Edward Snowden that revealed tactics used by the National Security Agency.

Olsen said plots are more rapidly evolving, due to the use of social media and encrypted messages urging individuals to carry out attacks. 

“The compressed time frame for these plots to develop limits the opportunity for our intelligence and law enforcement professionals to disrupt potential attacks,” he said.

Olsen said the rise of ISIS and the overall threat landscape present “enormous challenges” to counterterrorism, law enforcement and military professionals, and to policymakers across the government.

He urged broadening and strengthening the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS, and redoubling intelligence collection efforts. 

“The enduring lesson we have learned since 9/11 is that American leadership is indispensable to this fight,” he said.