The Pentagon pushed back Tuesday against accusations that the Obama administration exaggerated or fabricated the threat from the Khorasan group to justify airstrikes in Syria, saying the al Qaeda offshoot still poses a danger to U.S. interests.
“That’s absolutely false. That’s a ridiculous accusation. We’ve been watching this group for a long time,” Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby said.
Kirby said he could not confirm reports that Khorasan group leader Muhsin al-Fadhli had been killed in the Sept. 22 strikes on the group’s headquarters near Aleppo and said officials were not “100 percent” certain the group’s plans had been foiled.
“We’re still assessing the effectiveness of what we did,” he said, noting that the group remained a threat.
“I’d much rather be up here defending what we did before they were able to do something than having to be up here trying to talk about why we didn’t take action after they conducted an attack,” he said.
The Khorasan group had received little notice before the Sept. 22 strikes, which officials said were conducted to disrupt “imminent” attack planning against the U.S. or other Western targets.
The first mention of the group came in a Sept. 13 Associated Press story that quoted unnamed U.S. officials as saying it was a cadre of veteran al Qaeda fighters from Afghanistan and Pakistan who had been dispatched by al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri to Syria to recruit Western fighters for terrorist attacks. The group was also said to have been in contact with al Qaeda bombmakers from Yemen who were experimenting with devices that could evade airport security measures.
The relative silence about the group before the strikes and its connection to al Qaeda have prompted speculation that the Obama administration either exaggerated the group’s importance or fabricated it entirely.
A widely cited article in the Intercept by Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussein described Khorasan as “the wholesale concoction of a brand new terror threat” used to provide legal justification for the strikes in Syria targeting the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Other reports have noted that association of the group with al Qaeda would make strikes against it legal under the 2001 authorization for the use of military force against the terrorist network.
Kirby made clear that the Pentagon considers Khorasan an al Qaeda offshoot, along with its host in Syria, the al-Nusra Front. “In our minds, from a military perspective, they are very much one and the same,” he said.
But other administration officials have added to the confusion by insisting on a distinction between the Khorasan group and what they call “core al Qaeda.” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki, when asked Monday about whether the Khorasan group was a part of “core al Qaeda,” would only say it was “affiliated with” the terrorist network.
“So I wouldn’t characterize it that way,” she said.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest on Friday repeated a common refrain from the administration that “core al Qaeda has been decimated” when asked about Khorasan, which led some conservatives to suggest officials were sending a mixed message about the threat.
“It’s a distinction without meaning,” former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., told the Washington Examiner. “They’re just part of the larger movement.”
