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Steven Emerson,
Executive Director
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March 30, 2016
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NYT
Acknowledges Findings on Rise of ISIS in Europe
by Pete Hoekstra
IPT News
March 30, 2016
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The New York Times
finally acknowledged conclusions identified by the Investigative Project on
Terrorism (IPT) and others for months, if not years, on how inept leaders turned a blind eye to the rise in Europe
of the world's most lethal Islamist terror network.
The Times article, "How ISIS Built the Machinery of Terror Under Europe's Gaze,"
discusses how ISIS is far better organized than commonly understood. It
also underscores how Western intelligence, law enforcement and political
leadership committed glaring mistakes that enabled it to become much more
of a threat than it should be.
ISIS is obsessed with inflicting as many gruesome fatalities as possible
against the West, but it will settle for smaller scale assaults in the
interim. It has established a unit solely dedicated to orchestrating
attacks in Europe and Western interests throughout the Middle East and
Africa. Quoting from internal documents, the Times notes that the
ISIS external operations branch is fundamentally a factory for producing potential
jihadists.
The terror group implemented extensive procedures to maintain
operational integrity through encryption and strict procedures for
communicating over mobile phones. These measures are designed to obscure
ties to ISIS after attacks occurred. ISIS additionally improved the
process for developing TATP, a powerful explosive produced with readily
available materials.
The Times article also details the ineffectiveness of Western
leadership. The ability of ISIS to establish a caliphate substantially
enhances its ability to prepare and plot against its neighbors in the
region and the West. People attracted to it know generally where they need
to travel to establish contact. The West, however, remains unwilling to
eliminate the caliphates in Iraq/Syria and Libya.
Of additional interest is how the West missed so many clues and, again,
continues to fail to connect the dots. The inability to track individuals
going to war zones and returning to Europe is a massive intelligence
failure. European law enforcement officials who identified potential
jihadists were unable to effectively track or even identify the threat that
they might pose. Even after attacks might have occurred, officials quickly
dismissed any direct or indirect connections to ISIS.
Western officials really believed until 2014 that ISIS was the 'JV team.' It appears that it was not only the
assessment as articulated by the U.S. president but was broadly shared
throughout the international security community.
As a result, the West has become much more vulnerable to the stronger
Islamist terror threat. The IPT predicts in a recent analysis how ISIS will continue to target Europe
over the next 18 to 24 months without a new strategy for defeating it. The Times
helpfully details to its readers in part how the IPT reached its conclusions.
Pete Hoekstra is the Shillman Senior Fellow at the Investigative
Project on Terrorism and the former Chairman of the U.S. House
Intelligence Committee. He is the author of "Architects of Disaster: The Destruction of Libya."
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