"Syria is a very rich recruiting ground for the Khorasan Group," which targets primarily first- and second-generation European immigrants because "it's much easier to train them, motivate them, give them a network and send them back to the west," said Rohan Gunaratna, head of the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
Gunaratna estimates that "it cannot be more than a few dozen" fighters who've gone through this process, "but they present a significant threat, because it will be difficult for Western governments to know who they are." The group's capacity to recruit, train and activate terrorists means there probably will be more, he said.
The U.S. carried out airstrikes against the group in Syria Tuesday to counter what officials said was an "imminent" terror attack. U.S. officials so far have provided no details about where, when or what the terrorists planned to attack or the credibility of the intelligence about a possible strike.
U.S. intelligence officials are trying to confirm whether the strike killed a man who used the name Muhsin al-Fadli, whom they believe to be the operational leader of Khorasan in Syria and who they think was in the building that was hit.
However, one official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters cautioned that the intelligence so far isn't conclusive, and al-Fadli's death wouldn't be the end of the group because it has a small cadre of leaders with experience in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Al-Qaida created Khorasan, the official said, after the death of Osama bin Laden.
A particular concern about the Khorasan faction, according to U.S. intelligence officials, is the group's link to al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula's leading bomb designer, Ibrahim al- Asiri, a Saudi Arabian in Yemen whom the U.S. has targeted with drones, so far unsuccessfully.
His specialty, said the officials speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss classified intelligence, has been bombs designed to explode aboard aircraft and inserted in clothing, implanted in the human body or packed into packages or computer printers. So far, they said, his explosive of choice has been the powerful pentaerythritol tetranitrate, known as PETN.
Despite the attention to Islamic State terrorists, Khorasan has emerged in recent weeks as a more immediate threat in the view of the U.S. intelligence community because it's focused on attacking America and Europe rather than establishing a new extremist caliphate in the Sunni Arab world.
The group's intentions put "them at the top of groups threatening the West," said Seth Jones, director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the Rand Corp., a policy group based in Santa Monica, California.
Regardless of Islamic State's "bluster," Jones said that extremist group poses less of a threat than Khorasan does because "Islamic State's focus right now seems to me to be trying to keep control of the territory it has in Syria and expand what it has in Iraq."
Khorasan "is essentially al-Qaida central moving into the Syria conflict," said Peter Bergen, a national security analyst and member of the Bipartisan Policy Center's Homeland Security Project, who spoke at a forum this week on terrorism.
Discussing the threat of a terrorist attack by the group, Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said Tuesday on ABC's "Good Morning America" that "we believe the individuals plotting and planning it were eliminated" in the eight U.S. airstrikes.
Khorasan's focus on recruiting Americans and Europeans and years of experience operating clandestinely as an extremist Sunni organization in Shiite Iran will make it hard for the U.S. to eliminate the threat completely, Gunaratna said.
U.S. and European officials estimate that about 12,000 foreign fighters have gone to Syria to fight. Most have gone to fight the Syrian regime, Gunaratna said, "but Khorasan is recruiting those people," especially Europeans whose passports enable them to return home or travel to the U.S., Canada, Australia and elsewhere without restrictions.
The extremist group is a "network of seasoned al-Qaida veterans" preparing to attack "United States and Western interests," the Defense Department said in a statement. Khorasan has expanded from a few dozen to hundreds of members since arriving in Syria about two years ago from Iraq and Iran, where they fled from Afghanistan in late 2001 and early 2002, according to Gunaratna.
Al-Qaida leaders dispatched the core group from the tribal areas of Pakistan to recruit European Union, Russian and U.S. passport holders coming to Syria to wage jihad, and some U.S. intelligence officials think it may be recruiting as well in Chechnya, Libya and Somalia, also magnets for young, disaffected Muslims.
The strikes against Khorasan militants west of Aleppo, Syria's largest city, were conducted by the U.S. using Tomahawk cruise missiles, according to the Pentagon. They were launched separately from a series of strikes by the U.S. and five Arab nations on Islamic State targets in Syria.
Lt. Gen. William Mayville, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was cautious in his evaluation, saying he didn't know yet whether the strikes against Khorasan were successful or whether any of the group's leaders were killed.
"We're still assessing the effects of our strikes," Mayville said at a Pentagon press conference Tuesday. The U.S. believed the group "was nearing the execution phase of an attack either in Europe or the homeland" and "has attempted to recruit Westerners to serve as operatives or to infiltrate back into their homelands," he said.
The Department of Homeland Security and the FBI Tuesday issued a joint intelligence bulletin in which they said that the strikes "may have temporarily disrupted attack plotting" by the Khorasan Group. It said that attacks by that group and by Islamic State "are less likely near-term," but that "plotting by these groups may accelerate."
The intelligence bulletin, which was obtained by Bloomberg News, addresses no specific plots and encourages police agencies to alert federal authorities to suspicious activity.
U.S security officials also have warned federal and local police departments to be on the lookout for "homegrown violent extremists" who may be motivated to strike in the wake of the airstrikes in Syria.
The strikes won't work to defeat Khorasan, Gunaratna said. "Targeting this group from the sky, you can't destroy it, because they are scattered and they are excellent in their clandestine operations," Gunaratna said. It means "the American fight against this group will go on for a long time," he said. "There are grave limits to fighting insurgency from the sky, from 10-20-30,000 feet above the ground."
U.S. officials had warned in the past week that the intelligence community needs to continue watching lower-profile terrorists amid the focus on Islamic State.
"What we can't do is let down our guards for any one of these" groups, CIA Director John Brennan said at a Sept. 18 conference on intelligence issues in Washington. "You have to be looking at some of these smaller groups."
In addition to Khorasan, those include the al-Nusra Front, which has ties to al-Qaida and has made clear its intent to launch attacks outside of the Syrian battleground.
Compared with Islamic State, fighters for al-Nusra keep a lower profile on the Internet, with most videos aimed at local Muslims, according to the Mapping Militant Organizations project at Stanford University in California. The videos or postings generally don't show identifiable fighters from the U.S. and Europe, even though the group attracts the second-largest contingent of foreign militants in Syria.
_ With assistance from Tony Capaccio, Del Quentin Wilber and John Walcott in Washington and Sangwon Yoon at the United Nations.
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