This week, Canadians learned what Americans already knew: The homefront is a battlefield in the war on terrorism.
The country’s military already was on heightened alert after two soldiers were struck by a car Monday near Montreal by Martin Couture-Rouleau, a recent convert to Islam with known radical ties whose passport had been seized to keep him from traveling to fight with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
Another recent convert was blamed for Wednesday’s killing of Cpl. Nathan Cirillo as he was guarding Canada’s National War Memorial in Ottawa. Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, who was shot and killed when he forced his way into Canada’s Parliament building, also had planned to travel to Syria to fight with the Islamic State, police said.
The connection to Islamist extremism led Prime Minister Stephen Harper to refer to both incidents as terrorist attacks and declare Thursday that “our laws and police powers need to be strengthened in the area of surveillance, attention and arrest.”
The attacks in Canada prompted both increased security and increased concern in the United States. In Washington, U.S. Army officials boosted security for guards at the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery. Though the guards are armed, their rifles are unloaded.
But there was no need to ask whether a similar attack could happen here. It already has and is likely to happen again.
From former Army officer Nidal Hasan killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, on Nov. 5, 2009, to the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013 and September’s beheading of a co-worker by a recent convert to Islam in Oklahoma who glorified terrorism and praised Osama bin Laden on Facebook, there have been several incidents of violence similar to the recent ones in Canada by self-described jihadis in the United States.
The Islamic State’s sophisticated use of social media has greatly broadened the extremists’ reach into U.S. society to the point where “lone wolf” attackers can be inspired to commit terrorism without an apparent connection to — or support from — any organization.
“The scope of this problem is huge. We’re only now starting to recognize how far ahead the extremists are,” said David Ibsen, executive director of the Counter Extremism Project, a recently formed private organization that works to augment government efforts to fight radicalization.
The emergence of the Islamic State has coincided with the emergence of communication tools such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube that allow extremists to target their messages to receptive audiences and reach them on a global scale, he said. “It’s a whole new method of ideological recruitment and motivation.”
Until the problem is brought under control, more attacks are likely, he said, noting that his group is working with social media organizations to find ways of disrupting the information flow from extremists to potential supporters.
Meanwhile, authorities need to be less passive about investigating threats that come up on the radar, said retired Army Lt. Gen. Edward Anderson, former deputy commander of Northern Command, the military command charged with homeland defense.
“We’re going to need to be more aggressive with that kind of thing,” he said. “Our intelligence community is going to need to be on top of their game.”
Passive measures such as the Army’s bolstering of security at Arlington are important to keep U.S. troops safe from an Ottawa-style attack, but Anderson said he would like to see better cooperation between intelligence and law enforcement to identify threats before they become imminent. “We don’t just simply let the situation develop until it becomes a tragedy,” he said. “We’re beyond that. This is too important.”
White House spokesman Josh Earnest on Thursday said the threat of “lone wolf” terrorism “is something that has long attracted the attention of the United States and the Obama administration. And the administration has laid out a very multifaceted strategy for combating it.”
But the administration’s approach has been criticized in many circles, especially for denying or downplaying the link between the spread of extremist Islamist ideology and incidents such as the Fort Hood shooting, which officials continue to refuse to label a terrorist attack.
This criticism was evident in a February 2011 report by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee examining the shooting. The report described Hasan as “a ticking time bomb” and faulted both the Army and the FBI for not noticing his growing extremism and taking action in time to prevent it. For example, the FBI knew Hasan was communicating by email with Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, but took no action.
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon, R-Calif., raised the same point Thursday in a statement on the terror attack in Ottawa.
“I was impressed with the Canadian government’s swift condemnation of what was obviously an act of terror. I wish the Obama administration used similar language during the Fort Hood shooting, rather than pretending that ‘workplace violence’ was an accurate description of a tragic terrorist attack,” he said.
