CQ WEEKLY – COVER STORY
July 31, 2015 – 1:42 p.m.
Islamic State: A Reality Check
By Todd Ruger, CQ Staff
A father in a small North Carolina town placed a panicked call to 911 on April 21 to report his 19-year-old son’s violent obsession with Islam. “I don’t know if it is ISIS or what, but he is destroying Buddhas and figurines and stuff,” the father said. “I mean, we’re scared to leave the house.” He told the dispatchers that his son had poured gasoline on some of the “religious” items in the home.
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In early June, the FBI dispatched an undercover agent to contact the son, Justin Sullivan, and the 11-day operation portrayed in court records revealed the kind of plot Americans fear. The self-described “mujahid” was arrested on charges he planned to buy a semi-automatic weapon and kill 1,000 people sometime between June 21 and June 23 — when his parents would be out of town.
But the FBI complaint doesn’t contain any sign of direct contact with the Islamic State terrorist group, also known as ISIS, ISIL or simply IS. “I liked IS from the beginning, then I started thinking about death and stuff so I became Muslim,” Sullivan told the undercover agent, according to court records of the case.
Sullivan is one of more than 60 people arrested or indicted in the United States over the past 17 months on terrorism-related charges, almost all with some kind of attribution to the Islamic State group. FBI Director
“ISIL is buzzing on your hip,” Comey said July 22 at a security conference, where he called the Islamic State more of a threat to the homeland than the group responsible for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. “That message is being pushed all day long, and if you want to talk to a terrorist they’re right there on Twitter direct-messaging for you to communicate with.”
House Homeland Security Chairman
A CQ review of the publicly available court records of Islamic State-related arrests and indictments, however, suggests a different picture of potential terrorist attacks in the United States. Through that lens, the Islamic State’s social media campaigns are clearly resonating with a small number of disaffected Americans, but there is much less evidence of the group’s direct outreach or direction in creating potential terrorists in America than comments from Comey and many lawmakers imply.
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Fewer than a third of the public arrests and indictments related to the Islamic State group in the past 17 months — 20 of the 65 found by CQ — showed any kind of concrete steps toward planning or carrying out a domestic attack, such as purchasing a gun or bomb-making equipment. The criminal complaints filed in those 20 arrests show little evidence that potential attackers spoke with Islamic State operatives directly or took direction from them. And only eight were allegedly communicating those ideas to someone other than an FBI undercover agent or confidential source.
The lines can be hard to draw. That number of potential domestic attackers doesn’t include, for example, three men arrested in New York, where court records state that one of the men told the FBI he would kill President
The FBI states that one of those men spoke to someone purporting to be Abu Bakr Bagdodi Halifat Dovlati Islamiya, also known as Bagdodi, the Iraq-based administrator of the website “Islamic State News,” which distributes the group’s propaganda. Abdurasul Juraboev said he contacted Bagdodi in August 2014 asking for a “fatwa” to do an attack in the United States, court records show. The purported Bagdodi replied, “How come you are not coming here?” according to the records.
In one of the more potent plots, a man told an FBI confidential source that he couldn’t speak to him anymore because he spoke with the Islamic State, which had told him not to talk about plans, but the details of that contact remain unclear.
Islamic State: A Reality Check
Several are like Harlem Suarez, arrested July 27 on an alleged plot to bury a backpack bomb — it was actually a dummy device supplied by law enforcement — on a beach in Key West, Fla. According to the FBI, he was trying to contact someone in Syria so he could travel there to fight but switched to a U.S. target after not receiving an answer.
Fully half of those arrested or indicted either traveled to Syria to fight for extremist Muslim groups, including the Islamic State, or they planned to but were foiled by the FBI. The remainder of those arrested helped with planning or recruited or funded others who tried to travel to or carry out attacks in America.
It’s also clear that many of these suspects held radical views well before they’d heard about the Islamic State group. In almost two-thirds of the cases — 40 of the 65 — the extremist beliefs of those involved have roots that can be traced back to before the group established a “caliphate” on June 29, 2014, in the territory it controls in Iraq and Syria. This is also long before the group, which had previously focused more on recruiting fighters to the Middle East, began calling on followers in the fall of 2014 to carry out attacks where they live.
Still, the cases suggest that the seriousness of the plots is increasing — and the FBI is moving more quickly to make arrests. Of the 65 arrests or indictments in the past 17 months, 38 have come since April 1. That period was also punctuated by an early May attack on the Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest in Garland, Texas, for which the Islamic State claimed responsibility and a June incident in Boston where a knife-wielding man, allegedly influenced by extremist social media sites, was shot and killed by police.
Of the arrests and indictments, six have pleaded to a charge and been sentenced between 48 and 180 months, while four have pleaded to a charge and await sentencing.
‘Persistent and Pervasive’
The picture, however, is incomplete. Arrests can remain sealed for various reasons. The FBI cautions that it doesn’t disclose everything it knows in the charging documents about the investigations, and officials could be withholding details of suspects’ contact with overseas operatives to mine those for intelligence value. Investigations can also take time to develop, and there’s not always a clear indication when and why someone turned to extremist views, or whether they spoke directly with someone in the Islamic State group.
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“While arrests and prosecutions are evidence of the tangible and imminent nature of the threats posed by ISIL, terrorism investigations in all 50 states reveal the persistent and pervasive nature of this threat,” an FBI spokesman says.
Comey and others have declined to elaborate about ongoing investigations, other than to say they are in all 50 states and require intensive manpower. “The threat that ISIL poses to the United States is very different in kind, in type, in degree, than al-Qaida,” Comey said. “ISIL is not your parents’ al-Qaida.”
The recent rise of Islamic State-related arrests in America appears to track more closely with the group’s emergence over al-Qaida as the apparent leader of the global jihad movement.
People who already displayed radical tendencies are “latching on to ISIS as a brand name” mostly because of the group’s seizure of territory and creation of a de facto mini-state, says Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA officer and former deputy director of the agency’s counterterrorism center.
“That is something that goes far beyond what other terrorist groups have done,” says Pillar, now a senior fellow at Georgetown University and the Brookings Institution. When it comes to online recruiting, he says, the Islamic State group “has been pretty darn skillful, but I wouldn’t say they’re in a class by themselves.”
Islamic State: A Reality Check
Republican Sen.
“I still believe that [al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula] is a greater threat to the homeland because I believe it has more capability to do a large-scale attack,” she says. “ISIS has had more success in inspiring homegrown terrorists, and recruiting them to come fight and train in Syria and Iraq, but the threat is really more of an inspirational threat.”
Those who follow the Islamic State’s violent ideology to conduct terrorist attacks in America are not the orchestrated and trained teams of operatives long feared by the FBI but instead are untrained “lone wolves” whose real danger is taking it upon themselves to act. Many are young men, and often they are naturalized citizens or have another connection to countries with a history of violent extremism, the details of those arrests show.
McCaul, in speeches at the Heritage Foundation and elsewhere, has cited the arrests to promote his bill for a program to combat Islamic State propaganda. He noted that more than 60 of its supporters have been arrested or indicted in the United States in the past year. “That’s more than one per week,” he noted.
The Texas Republican compared that with about $15 million spent and around 24 people working full time on the issue of combating Islamic State propaganda, and he calls it unacceptably low.
“That means we’ve arrested twice as many ISIS recruits in the United States this year than there are officials working to prevent ISIS from radicalizing Americans in the first place,” McCaul said at a July hearing.
But some of those arrests have only loose ties to the Islamic State group. Six of them came in February for a group of Bosnian immigrants in the United States, who the FBI says solicited money and otherwise supported Bosnian militant Abdullah Ramo Pazara starting in May 2013. Pazara, a truck driver, traveled from St. Louis to fight in Syria and Iraq, eventually for the Islamic State, and reportedly was killed there in September.
Nine of the arrests or indictments came from a Somali community in Minneapolis-St. Paul, where the terrorist group al-Shabab has been recruiting fighters for foreign battlefields since 2007.
Two women from Queens were arrested in May on charges that they plotted attacks inspired by the Boston Marathon bombing, but they had ties to Islamic extremism going back years. One had written a poem published in an al-Qaida magazine.
The recent Islamic State-related arrests, however, appear to increasingly involve the discussion or plotting of attacks in America, rather than the aspiration to travel to Syria.
After the July Fourth weekend, Comey met with news reporters to say that the FBI had thwarted several Islamic State-related terrorist plots targeting the holiday weekend. As proof, he cited 10 arrests in the previous four weeks, but he declined to give many details.
A CQ review of the 10 public arrests during that time shows that the Islamic State group played a major role in the justification for several plotters, although there is little evidence in the court records of direct involvement by the group.
One of the alleged plotters, Alexander Ciccolo, the son of a Boston Police supervisor, was picked up with details of his plans to attack a state university, according to court records. Ciccolo had been on the FBI’s radar since an informant — his father, according to news reports — told authorities that Ciccolo had a long history of mental illness in fall 2014, but there is no public indication that he spoke directly with the Islamic State group.
Islamic State: A Reality Check
Sullivan, the North Carolina man called in by his father, was mostly in contact with an undercover FBI operative. So was Amir al-Ghazi, who allegedly said he wanted to plan attacks on oil pipelines, “country roads with gutters” and police stations. Al-Ghazi said he was speaking to “a brother over there,” but it turned out to be a confidential FBI source, court records show.
The most serious case appears to be Munther Saleh, 20, an electrical engineering student who was allegedly planning an attack inspired by the Boston Marathon bombing, potentially on New York landmarks.
Saleh, during a conversation with an FBI confidential source, said, “Akhi [my brother] I’m very sorry, but I was ordered by dawlah officials not to talk to anyone.” That final communication to the confidential source “indicated that he is taking orders from persons he believes are ISIL officials,” the FBI complaint states.
When asked about the arrests, Comey blurred the line between all Islamic State-related arrests.
“What’s interesting about the ISIL model there, too, is the normal terms of inspired, directed or enabled blend together with ISIL because they’re just pushing. They’re like a devil on someone’s shoulder saying, ‘Kill, kill, kill,’ all day long,” Comey said at the July 22 forum. “So figuring out whether someone was directed or inspired or enabled is a waste of time in many cases.”
Senate Intelligence Chairman
That doesn’t mean every case has a direct link to the Islamic State group. “It doesn’t really matter because the threat is the same,” the North Carolina Republican says. “If you look at the landscape of the world since 9/11, there’s never been a period when there were so many streams of threats, here, globally.”
That view, however, isn’t even unanimous within the Justice Department or the Department of Homeland Security.
Speaking one day after Comey at the same forum, Homeland Security Secretary
Attorney General
Going Blind
One key factor is the changing technology, something that the Islamic State group has been unusually effective in harnessing.
“When you look at the Internet four, five, six years ago, it was anonymous, but the bad guy, the individual living in the U.S., still had to reach to a forum, identify that forum, go into that forum,” Michael Steinbach, assistant director of the FBI’s counterterrorism division, said at a congressional field hearing in Garland, Texas. “With social media, it’s pushed to you. It’s so far advanced in comparison to the anonymous Internet.”
Islamic State: A Reality Check
Comey has said FBI investigators “often lose” people in the United States who interacted with Islamic State operatives online. That’s because the potential terrorists move to a mobile messaging app that is encrypted end to end.
The public court records reviewed by CQ don’t show evidence of this kind of communication. But in hearings on Capitol Hill, articles and appearances on television, Comey is pushing Congress to grant officials access to those messages after going through a judicial order. Right now, the FBI cannot decrypt those messages, which officials worry might contain details of attacks against the U.S.
“What keeps me up at night these days is the ISIL threat in the homeland, and I worry very much about what I can’t see,” Comey said.
Burr, however, says he doesn’t think there is a legislative pathway right now because there’s no technical solution, and technology companies don’t want to change their programs. “And I think when you recognize the fact that if you want to hold a U.S. company to a different standard and they don’t like that, then they will move or domicile themselves in a place where they’re not held to that standard,” Burr says. “That’s not good for the U.S., for jobs, for the economy, and it won’t work from an intelligence-gathering standpoint.”
Democratic Sen.
“It seems to me that if companies will not voluntarily comply with lawful court orders for information, then they should be required to be able to do so through legislation in a way that protects security of consumer data against unauthorized access,” Feinstein said.
Beyond the questions about the obstacles to countering the Islamic State’s social media strength, however, officials say their biggest concern is about what the group could grow into, particularly with its success overseas.
“Anytime a terrorist organization with that level of resources — in excess of 30,000 fighters, with foreign fighters pouring into Syria — and that level of depravity establishing territory, an attempt to establish a caliphate in Iraq and Syria, so that this very large, dangerous terrorist organization has a place to base, train, send operatives,” Johnson said, “that is a huge homeland security concern to a number of nations.”