ISIS and the National Security Vulnerabilities of an Insecure Border
If they’d attack Putin and Iran, what will stop them from attacking our homeland?
By Andrew R. Arthur on April 9, 2024
Any number of experts are warning about potential terrorist threats to our homeland, but missing from most analyses is the source of such threats. The group you should be most worried about is Islamic State (ISIS) and especially its subsidiary, ISIS Khorasan (ISIS-K), which has both the motive and — thanks to President Biden’s border policies — the opportunity to strike the heart of America. Worse, ISIS-K has few concerns about the ramifications of its actions: Militants from the group recently carried out attacks in Russia and the Islamic Republic of Iran, and if they are not afraid of Putin or the mullahs, there’s no reason to think they’d hesitate to attack us.
ISIS, Syria, Iran, Russia, and the United States. In 2004, notorious terror mastermind Abu Musab al Zarqawi founded an al-Qaeda offshoot, al Qaeda in Iraq or “AQI”, a Sunni coalition of former Iraqi military and foreign fighters opposed to the U.S. occupation of that country.
Al-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.
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 the group to engage in yet another 2013 rebranding as “Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant”, known variously as “Daesh”, “ISIS”, or “ISIL”.
https://cis.org/Arthur/ISIS-and-National-Security-Vulnerabilities-Insecure-Border
