CIA Director John Brennan spoke before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday where he is expected to warn US lawmakers that Islamic State militants are training and preparing to deploy operatives for further attacks on the West and will rely more on guerrilla-style tactics to compensate for their territorial losses.
Most importantly, he said the Islamic State is working to smuggle them into countries, perhaps among refugee flows or through legitimate means of travel.
Brennan also noted the group’s call for followers to conduct so-called lone-wolf attacks in their home countries. He called last week’s attack in Orlando a “heinous act of wanton violence” and an “assault on the values of openness and tolerance” that define the United States as a nation.
It is unclear just how Brennan’s testimony is supposed to comfort Americans that, as Obama has been pleading, the Orlando attack was not the result of an activist of “radicalized Islam.” If anything, the CIA director’s warning confirms the concerns voiced by Trump that the US is the target for deadly ISIS ambitions.
Brennan also said IS is gradually cultivating its various branches into an interconnected network: the branch in Libya is likely the most advanced and most dangerous, but IS is trying to increase its influence in Africa, he said. The IS branch in the Sinai has become the “most active and capable terrorist group in Egypt,” attacking the Egyptian military and government targets in addition to foreigners and tourists, such as the downing of a Russian passenger jet last October.
Other branches have struggled to gain traction, he says. “The Yemen branch, for instance, has been riven with factionalism. And the Afghanistan-Pakistan branch has struggled to maintain its cohesion, in part because of competition with the Taliban.”
He called IS a “formidable adversary,” but said the U.S.-led coalition has made progress combating the group, which has had to surrender large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria and has lost some of its leaders in airstrikes. IS has struggled to replenish its ranks of fighters, Brennan said, because fewer of them are traveling to Syria and others have defected.
“The group appears to be a long way from realizing the vision that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi laid out when he declared the caliphate two years ago in Mosul,” Iraq, Brennan said.
He said the group’s ability to raise money has also been curtailed, although the group still continues to generate at least tens of millions of dollars in revenue each month, mostly from taxation and from sales of crude oil.“Unfortunately, despite all our progress against ISIL on the battlefield and in the financial realm, our efforts have not reduced the group’s terrorism capability and global reach,” he said.
Ironically, according to Brenann, the worse the Islamic State’s funding situation gets, the more likely it is to intensify its attacks against the west. “In fact, as the pressure mounts on ISIL, we judge that it will intensify its global terror campaign to maintain its dominance of the global terrorism agenda.”
And since the military campaign against ISIS is accelerating to the point where the future viability of the Islamic State is now in question, we expect many more such “radicalized” attacks – even if they are simply blamed on ISIS – on US soil to come in the coming months.
His testimony can be found here, and his full recorded testimony can be watched below.
