This past weekend, while you were attending church, watching the Masters or just enjoying the beautiful early Spring sunshine, ISIS was busy releasing an 11-minute video called “We Will Burn America.”
The title is self-explanatory: the video promises another 9/11 on U.S. soil and calls on ISIS supporters to rise up and murder U.S. citizens around the world.
Here are three ways in which ISIS–and the global jihadist movement–could potentially strike America and make their demonic dreams a reality:
1) “City Wolves”
Back in February, FBI Director James Comey made a stunning statement about ISIS supporters in the United States: “Those people exist in every state,” Comey said. “I have homegrown violent extremist investigations in every single state. Until a few weeks ago there was 49 states. Alaska had none which I couldn’t quite figure out.”
He added, “But Alaska has now joined the group so we have investigations of people in various stages of radicalizing in all 50 states.”
When the FBI Director says that ISIS boasts a network of supporters and sympathizers in every state of the union, it’s pretty clear that the barbarians are not just the gates: they’re inside them.
ISIS calls these homegrown jihadists “city wolves” and is actively encouraging them to carry out one-man (or one-woman) jihads in U.S. cities.
Some have already heeded the call. If ISIS supporters begin to carry out smaller scale, horrific attacks like this on a regular basis in American cities (certainly not implausible, given that even the FBI Director concedes that ISIS’s tentacles stretch into every U.S. state), creating a virtual guerilla war-type climate, the U.S. economy and psyche could be affected in profound ways.
2) The Returnees
Department of Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson recently admitted that at least 40 of the estimated 180 U.S. citizens who have traveled overseas to fight alongside ISIS have already returned home.
“We have in fact kept close tabs on those who we believe have left and those who’ve come back,” Johnson told 60 Minutes. “A number have been arrested or investigated and we have systems in place to track these individuals. But you can’t know everything.”
That last statement is the kicker.
If our top Homeland Security official says we apparently can’t know everything about these presumably battle-tested, fanatical jihadists returning to American soil, what’s to say a few won’t slip through the cracks and carry out attacks?
Do we really believe that an American ISIS recruit fresh off slicing heads in Syria is just going to transition peacefully back into civilian life, abandon jihad and get a job at McDonald’s?
By the way, up to 5,000 Europeans have also left their comfortable lives in the West behind to travel to the Islamic State.
A sizable chunk have already reportedly returned home. And remember: Western Europeans can enter the United States without a visa.
3) The Border
One of the most chilling passages in my latest book, “ISIS Exposed” came during my conversation with former CIA clandestine services officer Brian Fairchild.
Fairchild, who worked for the Agency for decades in hotspots around the world, told me of his concerns that an ISIS jihadist would smuggle a chemical or biological agent across America’s porous southern border and use it in a terror attack on an American city.
If this chilling claim from the watchdog group Judicial Watch is to be believed, Fairchild’s concerns have even more validity.
Bottom line: we’re nearly 14 years removed from 9/11 and yet our borders are so ridiculously unsecured that there might as well be neon signs flashing that say “Jihadists Welcome” upon entrance into the U.S. from Mexico and Canada.
A nation-state cannot sustain itself long-term–or protect its citizens– if it refuses to secure its borders.
Contrary to the beliefs of the Obama administration, ISIS–and the global jihadist movement that it now spearheads–is no mere criminal nuisance that can be handled in federal courts.
Jihadists worldwide have declared war on America. Unfortunately, under its current leadership, America is far from war footing.
