TerrorismThwarting Islamist terrorism in U.S. requires counterterrorism measures abroad

When the FBI arrested two Chicago-area cousins last week on terrorism related charges, it was the 64th post-9/11 case of Islamic terrorists plotting to strike on U.S. soil, according to a new report from the Heritage Foundation. Hasan Edmonds, a 22—year old Illinois National Guardsman,was arrested last Wednesday at Chicago’s Midway Airport as he tried to board a plane on his journey to Cairo, Egypt to join the Islamic State. His cousin, 29-year old Jonas Edmonds, intended to wear Hasan’s National Guardsman uniform and launch an attack on the Joliet Armory, where Hasan’s National Guard unit was based, authorities say.

Like many post-9/11 terror attacks planned against Americans at home, the Edmonds’ plot was thwarted by law enforcement deploying aggressive counterterrorism measures. Analysts, however, warn that the number of attempts will continue to increase unless similar measures are deployed abroad. “Since the inspirational source of domestic radicalization and terrorism often originates from overseas, battling violent Islamist extremism abroad must be addressed in concert with the challenges presented by the terrorism at home,” read the report.

Fox Newsreportsthat the report’s authors — David Inserra, research associate in the Heritage Foundation’s Allison Center for Foreign and National Security Policy and Peter Brookes, senior fellow for National Security Affairs at the Heritage Foundation — found that the Edmonds’ plot was the 17th aimed at the military, and fifty-three of the sixty-four plots were planned or perpetrated by homegrown extremists. These plots or attacks include:

• December 2001: Failed “shoebomber” Richard Reid tried to blow up a Miami-bound flight from Paris.
• May 2002: Radicalized former gang member Jose Padilla was arrested for allegedly plotting to detonate a “dirty bomb.”
• May 2003: Lyman Faris of Columbus, Ohio, arrested for conspiring to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge.
• June 2006: The “Liberty City Seven,” members of a Florida religious cult, were arrested in a plot to blow up Chicago’s Sears Tower and other government buildings.
• 15 April 2013: Ethnic Chechen brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev carried out the Boston Marathon bombings that killed three people and wounded 260. Tamerlan was killed days after the attack; Dzhokhar’s trial, in which he claimed his brother was the driving force in the attack, is concluding.
• 25 September 2014: Alton Nolen, a “lone wolf” radical who had frightened co-workers at an Oklahoma meat packing company with his Islamic extremist rantings, decapitated a woman he worked with before a company executive could shoot him. He is awaiting trial.
• 14 January 2015: Christopher Cornell aka Raheel Mahrus Ubaydah, who the FBI said was a supporter of the Islamic State, was charged with planning to bomb the U.S. Capitol and shoot those who fled from the area.

Inserra and Brookes encourage law enforcement agencies to practice positive community outreach to build trust in local communities, particular immigrant and Muslim communities, which tend to be the target of extremist recruiters. ISIS relies on Western recruits to advance its ideological war. To date, some 20,000 foreign fighters from as many as ninety countries have traveled to ISIS held territories to join the group.

“So long as terror groups are able to conduct notable attacks and control territory, they will continue to inspire additional radicals around the world,” Inserra wrote. “While the U.S. and its allies must continue to try to stop terror attacks with all the tools at their disposal, the West must also defeat ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other terrorist groups to prevent the spread of their violent ideology.”

ISIS’s high profile attacks like the one against Paris’s Charlie Hebdo, its beheadings of twenty-one Coptic Egyptian Christian fishermen in Syria, and public crucifixions continue to gain it followers.

“It might be argued that perceptions of the Islamic State or al Qaeda affiliates as ‘winners,’ despite their acts of brutality and terror, will serve as a powerful motivator for radicalization and violence,” Inserra and Brookes wrote. “Unless this perception is altered through any number of possible means, these groups will continue to attract followers both at home and abroad, ensuring a continuation of their brand of violent Islamist extremism.”