Top US spy says Somalia, Yemen, Syria and Iraq pose greater terrorist threat than Afghanistan

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Terror threats emanating from Somalia, Yemen, Syria and Iraq, particularly ISIS, pose a greater danger than those that could emerge from Afghanistan, National Intelligence Director April said. Haines at the annual National Intelligence and Security Summit.

“As for the homeland, the threat of terrorist groups right now, we don’t prioritize at the top of the Afghanistan list,” he said, speaking by video conference. “What we’re looking at is Yemen, Somalia, Syria and Iraq for ISIS. This is where we see the biggest threat.”

Officials have publicly said the Islamic State branch in Afghanistan, ISIS-K, poses a potential threat to the United States. The group staged a suicide bombing on August 26, in the midst of a U.S. evacuation from Kabul, that killed 13 members of the U.S. service and dozens of Afghans.

Haines said the main goal of the intelligence community now is to control “any possible reconstitution of terrorist organizations” in Afghanistan.

ISIS continues to operate in Syria and Iraq, although the group has been reduced by the U.S. military presence in both countries. In Yemen, an al Qaeda affiliate based there has tried to attack the United States. And in Somalia, the United States has regularly carried out anti-terrorist strikes against Al-Shabaab, which in early 2020 launched an attack on a U.S. facility in Kenya that killed a U.S. soldier and two northern contractors. -americans.

But 20 years after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Haines also argued that the threat to the U.S. homeland of international terrorist groups “has diminished over time,” crediting a “huge effort” by the entire U.S. government to degrade the ability of groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS to carry out attacks inside the United States.

CNN has previously reported that it has become infinitely more difficult for the intelligence community and the U.S. military to gather the information needed to carry out counterterrorism attacks on ISIS and other targets in Afghanistan without troops. Americans on the ground.

The Biden administration and military commanders have insisted that they have what military capabilities call “on the horizon,” the ability to monitor and carry out anti-terrorist attacks from afar, which need to discover and prevent terrorist planning in Afghanistan. But former officials, lawmakers and others have raised doubts about the administration’s plan, saying they have seen few details to support it.

Haines said Monday that the intelligence community is developing “indicators so we can understand what things we are likely to see in the event of a reconstitution” of terrorist groups in Afghanistan.

This means making sure that “we have enough collection to monitor these indicators, so that we can give a warning to the policy community, to the operators, so that they can act in case we see it.” she said.

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