This week's attacks in Paris are a reminder that al-Qaida remains the number-one jihadist threat to the United States, a veteran terrorism analyst said on Friday.
Michael Kugelman, senior associate for south Asia at the
Woodrow Wilson Center, pointed to reports that one of the suspects in Wednesday's attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris may have had links to al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), al-Qaida's top terrorist affiliate.
Thus far, the Islamic State (ISIS) has expended much of its energy terrorizing Westerners in Syria and Iraq. While there is good reason to believe that Westerners going there will eventually return to their home countries to stage attacks, a more immediate threat may come from AQAP, Kugelman wrote in the
Wall Street Journal.
The Paris terror rampage is a reminder that al-Qaida is determined to attack the United States, he added.
Kugelman observed that AQAP has been linked to at least three attempts to attack the United States since November 2009. One was the
Christmas day 2009 attempt to bring down a trans-Atlantic flight from Amsterdam to Detroit by detonating an explosive hidden in a terrorist's underwear.
Another was an attempt in
October 2010 to bring down several U.S.-bound cargo aircraft using improvised explosive devices concealed in printer ink cartridges. The parcels were reportedly addressed to two Chicago-area synagogues.
A third attack targeting the United States that was linked to the AQAP was the November
2009 Fort Hood massacre, in which Maj. Nidal Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, opened fire on fellow service personnel at a military base in Texas, killing 13 people and wounding 32 others.
Hasan and jihadist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki – a U.S.-born imam who eventually became a key figure in the AQAP's terrorist infrastructure – exchanged at least 18 emails between December 2008 and June 2009. The FBI, which had been investigating Awlaki, was aware of the emails.
But bureau officials acknowledged that their San Diego-based terrorism task force investigating Awlaki failed to forward most of the emails to Washington. FBI officials also acknowledged that they should have interviewed Hasan about the emails but failed to do so.
After hearing the FBI acknowledgment at a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing in 2012, then-Rep.
Frank Wolf said government officials had not taken the Hasan-Awlaki connection seriously enough.
"An active-duty member of the military communicating with a known radicalizer and recruiter should have been taken more seriously than it was," the Virginia Republican said.
Awlaki was killed in Yemen by a U.S. drone strike on Sept. 30, 2011.
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