Alarms Blaring
Just in recent weeks, the Obama administration has requested tighter security at overseas airports with U.S.-bound flights because intelligence indicated that al-Qaeda is developing an improved bomb that can fool airport security scans. The master bomb-makers of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, who are reportedly behind the heightened alert, have already attempted to use an “underwear bomb” on an overseas flight over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009 , as well as bombs hidden in printer cartridges on cargo planes headed to the U.S. Recent intelligence suggests that those Yemeni bomb-makers have now joined with Islamic extremist groups that have captured large swaths of territory in Syria and attracted thousands of foreign fighters to the conflict there, , a development that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder told ABC News was “more frightening than anything I think I’ve seen as attorney general.”
Last week Holder travelled to Europe to raise the alarm about the more than 7,000 foreign fighters who have flocked to Syria to fight under the black banner of Islamic extremist groups there. (The largest, which originated as Al-Qaeda in Iraq but long since splintered off, is known variously as the Islamic State; ISIS, the Islamic State in Iraq & Syria; and ISIL, the Islamic State in Iraq & the Levant, a term that includes Lebanon). U.S. intelligence estimates that roughly 1,500 of those militants hold European passports, meaning they can travel easily in the West without visas or extra scrutiny. Dozens are believed to be Americans, including a 22-year-old from Florida who became one of the few American suicide bombers in an operation in late May.
“The Syrian conflict has turned that region into a cradle of violent extremism,” said Holder in a speech in Oslo, Norway. “But the world cannot simply sit back and let it become a training ground from which our nationals can return and launch attacks.”
The growing number of Western jihadists is just the latest evidence that the years-old Syrian civil war has become an incubator for Islamic extremist groups, much like the prolonged Afghan civil war in the 1990s gave rise to the original Al Qaeda and its ally the Taliban. Counterterrorism experts have not forgotten that after the Arab militants who fought in Afghanistan as mujahidin returned home, they formed terrorist cells and launched numerous attacks against their own countries. Another of the primary lessons of Afghanistan in the 1990s was that if Islamic extremist groups control territory and enjoy sanctuary for training and plotting, the number and sophistication of their terrorist plots rises exponentially.
Because it is fueled by sectarian tensions along Islam’s 1,300-year-old Sunni-Shiite divide, and it is taking place at the center of a region roiled by upheavals following the Arab Spring rebellions, the Syrian civil war increasing resembles 1990s Afghanistan, only on steroids. It has already spawned the Islamic State, arguably the most well-financed and powerful Islamic extremist group in modern history. Islamic State militants control territory in Syria, from which they launched last month’s offensive juggernaut that rapidly captured nearly all the Sunni regions of Iraq, bringing that country to the brink of disintegration.