The White House declined to comment directly on reports of a terrorist threat to U.S. airlines from another band of extremists in Syria called Khorasan, saying that the intelligence community remains “vigilant” about all threats from Syria.
“Our intelligence professional have long spoken about the host of terrorism threats that are emanating from Syria,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters Thursday. “I’m not in a position to provide granular detail about specific cells. … Doing so would be counter-productive or our whole-of-government approach” to counter-terrorism.
The U.S. government, he said, would “remain vigilant” about the threats and noted that often guarding against certain threats requires “tweaking of our national security posture.”
Some of these tweaks, he said, are “pretty evident to the traveling public and sometimes they are not.”
Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., mentioned Khorasan in a committee hearing Wednesday, but U.S. officials declined to comment on the threat it poses in an unclassified setting.
Separate from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Khorasan is made up of militants from al Qaeda-central, near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan and have joined the fight in Syria against the regime of President Bashar Assad, CBS News reported earlier Thursday.
The group’s came from Pakistan, former CIA deputy director Mike Morell told CBS News, and focus on attacks in the West, and are specifically working on trying to build bombs capable of being sneaked onto airliners.
