Hundreds of jihadists could launch terrorist attacks against the United States in the coming years, says Walid Phares, a terrorism expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
“It doesn’t surprise me that there are dozens and perhaps hundreds of jihadists who are potential suicide bombers, potential urban fighters who are going to be deployed against the U.S. around the world … and of course within the U.S.,” he told Kathleen Walter of Newsmax.TV.
Phares’ most recent book is “The Confrontation: Winning the War against Future Jihad.”
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Attempted terrorism attacks, now at 13, against the United States have risen exponentially this year, he says. “It’s important that the administration, as the president has said, needs to do a serious review of strategies against al-Qaida but also against home grown jihadists.”
The administration is focusing mainly on security breaches, such as how a Nigerian terrorist was nearly able to bring down the plane headed for Detroit Christmas Day, Phares said.
“Security breaches are important,” Phares said. “But the real problem is much bigger than that. It is how and who is radicalizing these individuals.”
Al-Qaida is watching us, he says. “They are analyzing every measure we develop and within a few months or years are able to create countermeasures, as we saw now.”
The problem is that the Obama administration early this year denied the existence of a global war on jihadists outside of al-Qaida, Phares argues.
“We are in confrontation with jihadists who could emerge in Yemen, link up with Nigerians who have activities in London or France and have connections with the radical imam in Yemen, who was linked with individuals who have penetrated our system as was the case I think in the Fort Hood massacre.”
The administration needs to know “who is indoctrinating these young men and potentially women to become human missiles,” Phares said.
“If we don’t go back to the roots of who is indoctrinating worldwide and in the U.S., we are going to see a lot of individuals who are going to try to bring down airliners, ships, buildings or operate as [Nidal Malik] Hasan did on a U.S. military base.”
Phares says al-Qaida’s central organization isn’t as strong on the ground as it was before the Afghanistan war began. But now the terrorist group has spread like a cancer – to Pakistan, Iraq, India and Yemen. Probably the biggest area of concern now is Africa, he says.
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“We must widen our attention,” Phares said. “What is it that the jihadist network is developing so that they can recruit and expand in numbers?”
Some of the recruiting takes place from liberal democraciess and jihadists have penetrated law enforcement agencies, he said.
“The problem now is to detect the mother ship,” Phares said. That’s “the pool of individuals who are spreading the ideology and are recruiting from that pool of indoctrinated individuals.”
The Fort Hood attack and the airline attack may well be connected, he says. “If we see a lone wolf, it doesn’t mean that a pack of wolves doesn’t exist somewhere,” Phares said.
“This is their weapon. They want us to believe that these individuals on their own are waging extremist warfare against the U.S., when in reality they are unleashing them. Al-Qaida has found a way to use individuals who have no real history of being on any of our lists and unleashing them against us.”
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