The first targets of U.S. air and missile strikes in Syria late Monday were bases of an Islamist extremist group that had received little mention amid the focus on the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria but that U.S. officials now say posed an imminent threat to the homeland.
The Khorasan group, an al Qaeda offshoot, was hit with more than 40 Tomahawk cruise missiles and precision-guided bombs from U.S. aircraft to disrupt “imminent” attack planning against the U.S. or other Western targets, Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby said Tuesday.
“The United States took action to protect our interests and remove their capacity to act,” he said, noting that the group had established a safe haven in northern Syria to plan attacks, test explosives and recruit Westerners to conduct them.
Pentagon officials could not say whether Monday night’s attacks removed the threat from the group.
“It would be premature to comment” before a full damage assessment can be conducted, said Lt. Gen. William Mayville, director of operations for the staff that serves the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
While U.S. officials and many experts who study Islamist extremist groups have discounted the possibility of an imminent attack from the Islamic State on the U.S. or other Western countries — even from the thousands of foreign fighters known to have traveled from those countries to Syria to fight for the group — the Khorasan group received little mention.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., on Sunday was one of the first officials to openly suggest that the group was a greater threat to the United States than the Islamic State. He described Khorasan as “forward-deployed al Qaeda operatives who were engaging with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to develop a terror plot to bring down airplanes.”
A senior administration official said the strikes were prompted by intelligence showing that the group’s plotting had reached an “advanced stage.”
The group’s apparent leader is Muhsin al-Fadhli, a senior al Qaeda facilitator and financier who was close to Osama bin Laden and at one time was based in Iran, according to the Justice Department. The U.S. is offering a $7 million reward for the capture of al-Fadhli, who reportedly had advance knowledge of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
“The Khorosan group really grows out of al Qaeda — so essentially this is the same cast of characters that we’ve had our eye on for a number of years — this is not a new group cut out of whole cloth,” the official said.
