U.S. Military and intelligence officials continue to struggle with preventing lone wolves from carrying out attacks on behalf of the Islamic State, Brett McGurk, the Obama administration’s representative to the anti-Islamic State coalition, said Tuesday.
“They are still trying to recruit deranged individuals from all around the world who will act in their name and that is something that is very hard to stop,” McGurk told reporters at the White House.
The counterterrorism expert said the radical Islamic terror group continues to plot attacks against the U.S. and its Western allies, but their planning has been made more difficult by increased pressure from opposition forces on the group’s stronghold in Raqqa, Syria.
“The very sophisticated attacks — the Brussels attack, the Paris attacks — were planned in Raqqa [and] we think we’ve significantly degraded their ability to do that,” McGurk said.
“But they do have operatives in various places in which they are hoping to plan attacks,” he added. He said the U.S. has focused heavily on eliminating external leaders within the Islamic State group who have been plotting attacks from outside their current territory in Iraq and Syria.
Officials announced Tuesday that coalition forces killed three Islamic State officials, including two who were involved in plotting the attack in Paris last year.
