The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee says at least one foreign fighter for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has already traveled in and out of the United States before committing a suicide bombing overseas.
Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., cited the example as one of the reasons the intelligence community is so concerned about Americans and other Westerners going to fight for Islamic State and returning home to carry out a terrorist attack on U.S. soil.
“There was an American that went over and he was radicalized, trained to be a suicide bomber and he came home to see his parents, left, went back and when he went back he killed himself and a lot of people,” Ruppersberger told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday, declining to elaborate with further detail.
“That’s an example. What’s concerning to us is when you have a passport, you can go back and forth with impunity,” he said.
A Ruppersberger spokeswoman on Wednesday confirmed that her boss was referring to an American whom U.S. intelligence authorities have previously discussed publicly.
In early September, Matthew Olsen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, gave a speech at the Brookings Institute in which he discussed a 22-year-old American from Florida who blew himself up while detonating a truck bomb in a restaurant in northern Syria that was frequented by Syrian soldiers.
In his address, Olsen said only that the American suicide bomber was with al-Nusrah Front, an al Qaeda affiliate, which posted the video of the attack online.
Some 12,000 foreign fighters have flocked to Syria over the past three years, including more than 1,000 Europeans and at least 100 Americans. U.S. authorities are trying to stop the jihadist flight and track the passports of those already believed to have joined the ISIS fight.
On Tuesday night, the Justice Department announced that a grand jury has accused a Yemen-born man living in Rochester of recruiting American fighters for the Islamic State and plotting an attack on members of the U.S. military returning from Iraq. It appeared to be the first case of a person in the U.S. being accused of recruiting for ISIS.
The FBI has arrested more than half a dozen individuals seeking to travel from the U.S. to fight for ISIS, Olsen said in his recent speech to Brookings, although he didn’t say when the arrests were made.
Since the Islamic State became a major foreign policy focus in June, U.S. authorities repeatedly have said that they know of no specific active Islamic State threat to carry out an attack on the U.S. homeland.
But they are also quick to point out that the U.S. intelligence community wasn’t picking up on specific threats in the months leading up to the Sept. 11 2001, attacks.
Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, characterized the risk of Americans coming back to the United States after fighting for Islamic State in Syria or Iraq and launching an attack as “significant.”
“Given what they’ve already demonstrated in terms of brutality and utter disregard for human life, other than those who adhere to their ideology, whatever weapons system they would have in their possession – there’s no doubt that they would use it, including weapons of mass destruction,” he said.
Noting that military officials have been in close contact with both the U.S. intelligence communities and U.S. law enforcement, he said the risk of those in the U.S. becoming radicalized would increase until ISIS’ “momentum is reversed” and U.S. authorities are able to counter their ability to recruit and put out propaganda on social media and the Internet.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the threat to the U.S. homeland is real even though our intelligence community has yet to identify an active terrorist plot to take place on U.S. soil
“If you go back to the year before 9/11, there were no specifics on a threat that year,” she told the Examiner. “It’s the same as this year, but there was this sense that something was going to happen, and you have a much more sophisticated group that is a fighting force and rapidly growing with equipment and continued funding and committing atrocity after atrocity.”
“Before 9/11 we didn’t really see what al Qaeda could do,” she added. “We’ve seen it with this organization.”
U.S. authorities have identified more than a dozen of the 100 Americans believe to have joined ISIS as coming from the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.
The twin cities have a large Somali population, the largest concentration in the U.S., but the Islamic State recruits are not limited to Somalis.
Two Americans who were killed fighting for ISIS were raised in the United States. Douglas McCain and Troy Kastigar attended the same high school the Minneapolis suburb of New Hope and were good friends. McCain later lived in San Diego before traveling to Syria to fight for ISIS.
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune in early September reported that a federal grand jury is investigating an attempt to convince 20 to 30 Somali men to leave Minnesota and join forces with ISIS.
Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., penned a letter dated Sept. 4 to Attorney General Eric Holder asking him to address ISIS recruitment in the state.
Holder on Monday announced a new series of pilot programs in cities across the country that aim to counter the rise of violent extremism with the United States by better connecting the FBI with local communities.
Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., said Tuesday that the Minneapolis Homeland Security Department office has recently briefed on the threat emanating from the twin cities and its efforts to stop it.
Minnesota has a history of their residents traveling overseas to join the ranks of terrorist groups. Last year, U.S. authorities said the city has lost some 25 to 40 men to al-Shabab, the Somalia-based terrorist group responsible for the attack on the mall in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2013.
“This is not a new for us,” Kline said in an interview. “We have a very large Somali community. … We have mosques and we clearly have had some indication that one or more of the imams has been talking some pretty strong language. We have had the example of some who have been radicalized and gone to the fight.”
“We also know there are many of these Somali Muslims who are great neighbors so it’s always the case, you have to be careful, you have to make sure you are going after those who have been radicalized who are Islamist terrorists,” he said.
Kline, who sits on the Armed Services Subcommittee on Intelligence, Emerging Threats and Capabilities, is worried that ISIS recruitment in Minneapolis is picking up speed after the extreme terrorist group’s advance across Iraq over the summer.
“Because they have been registering these big military success they have been recruiting — people like to go to a winner,” he continued. “The homegrown threat is a danger everywhere — not just in Minnesota, but throughout the country and in other Western countries.”
This story was originally posted at 5 a.m. and was updated at 12:36 p.m. It has been updated with a comment from Ruppersberger’s office about the identity of the foreign fighter for ISIS he referred to Tuesday night.
