IS loss of territory could heighten risk of attacks

Many fighters who don't die on the battlefield will seek to return to their home countries to launch "Islamic State" (IS) inspired attacks, CIA Director John Brennan said in Washington on Thursday. Meanwhile FBI Director James Comey said that if the IS caliphate is crushed, many surviving militants could flow into western Europe and aim to duplicate the Paris and Brussels attacks.

A breakup of IS could send hundreds of sympathizers underground around the world, lying quietly in wait for years to build new networks and plot attacks, Brennan said."The threat that I believe will dominate the next five years for the FBI will be the impact of the crushing of the caliphate," or the IS group, said James Comey, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

That will release "hundreds of hardened killers" into the general population, many of them going north to hide in Europe, he predicted. "We are facing this 'going dark' phenomenon where we cannot see these people," he said.

US anti-terror officials said on Thursday that the country has become hardened against well-developed plots but remains as vulnerable as ever to small attacks and especially to home-grown ones.

IS and Al-Qaeda are now hidden by less centralized networks and new communications technologies, they say.

"Our job is getting harder," said Nick Rasmussen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center. The widening of ways extremists can communicate with each other, many of them via popular smartphone apps and easy access to powerful encryption, "gives them the edge" against the US intelligence community, he said.

IS has seized territory in Syria and Iraq, while Al-Qaeda still exists without former leader Osama bin Laden, via affiliates, spinoffs. Rivals of both groups operate from the Philippines to West Africa and posing a more complex threat, Rasmussen said.

"The reality is that it has metastasized" from the Iraq-Syria region, said Frank Cilluffo, director of the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University. "The threat persists and is in some cases more complex."

A series of surprise attacks have placed "HVEs" - homegrown violent extremists - as much in the focus of intelligence agencies as threats from abroad.

The George Washington University Program on Extremism counts 102 people who have been charged in the United States with offenses related to IS, many of them recruited online.

A 29-year-old American of Afghan descent believed to hold radical Islamic sympathies shot dead 49 people in an Orlando gay nightclub in June. In December, a US-born man and his wife, both with Pakistani roots, killed 14 at a Christmas party in San Bernardino, California.

jbh/kl (AP, AFP)