FBI
Chief Warns ‘Terrorist Diaspora (the dispersion of any people from
their original homeland)’ Will Come to the West
Hundreds
of terrorists will fan out to infiltrate western Europe and the U.S. to
carry out attacks on a wider scale as Islamic State is defeated in
Syria, FBI Director James Comey warned.
“At
some point there’s going to be a terrorist diaspora out of Syria like
we’ve never seen before,” Comey said Wednesday in New York. “We saw the
future of this threat in Brussels and Paris,” said the head of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation, adding that future attacks will be on
“an order of magnitude greater.”
Comey’s
blunt warnings echo those of Republican presidential nominee Donald
Trump, who has scoffed at Obama administration efforts to defeat
Islamic State extremists in Syria and Iraq. Nonetheless, the FBI
chief’s comments reflect a consensus among U.S. intelligence officials
that the group inevitably will strike out abroad as it continues to
lose ground militarily under attack from a U.S.-led coalition…
Comey,
who called violence directed or inspired by Islamic State “the greatest
threat to the physical safety of Americans today,” said that “a lot of
terrorists fled out of Afghanistan in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
This is 10 times that or more.”
In
his remarks at a conference on cybersecurity, Comey also cited the
difficulty of heading off what are often called “lone-wolf” attackers
acting on the group’s calls for violence.
It
is “increasingly hard” for counterterrorism officials to find and stop
individuals inspired or directed by Islamic State who use a knife or a
vehicle to kill people, Comey said.
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