Recent “lone wolf” attacks in Ottawa and New York City are part of a larger Islamic extremist campaign against the U.S., House Homeland Security chairman Michael McCaul said Sunday.
“This is the profile of the enemy within,” McCaul said of the recent attacks in an interview on ABC, calling it “self-radicalization within the U.S.”
The Texas Republican tied last week’s attacks on Canadian soldiers in Ottawa and on police officers in New York City to the war waged by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.
“We worry a lot about ISIS traveling overseas from Syria to the United States, but I think one of the greatest fears are those already within the U.S. who are being radicalized and inspired by the ISIS propaganda that’s out there on the Internet,” McCaul said. “They are waging a campaign of war against the West and the U.S. and these are three examples, just last week, of where they’re winning.”
Lone-wolf attacks are a threat, McCaul said, because they are difficult to detect or anticipate.
“In a lot of cases these are people in the basement radicalizing over the Internet,” some of whom are not mentally healthy, McCaul said, adding that finding them before they strike “is like finding a needle in a haystack.”
Asked by ABC’s Martha Raddatz if he favored surveillance of U.S. mosques, as suggested this week by Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., McCaul demurred.
“Surveillance of mosques is a very sensitive issue,” McCaul said, explaining that he instead advocated better engagement of communities and local police with mosques.
If local police officers had known that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had been kicked out of his mosque, McCaul suggested, they might have been able to use that information to prevent him from bombing the Boston Marathon in 2013.
