Despite a loss of crucial territory in Iraq and Syria, intelligence officials said Tuesday that ISIS will likely remain a threat to the United States for years to come. The nation will be met with years of what counter-terrorism experts are calling "sustained vulnerability" from ISIS fighters, the Guardianreported Tuesday.
"The effects we're looking to see are simply going be delayed or lag behind the physical progress on the battlefield," Nicholas Rasmussen, National Counterterrorism Center director, told a Senate panel Tuesday. According to Rasmussen, this extended period of vulnerability is the unfortunate byproduct of the terrorist group's impending territory losses.
FBI director James Comey agreed, telling the panel that he estimated hundreds of ISIS operatives would flee from Iraq and Syria for years while creating an exfiltration "potency" not seen since the 1980s in Afghanistan. "There will be a terrorist diaspora some time in the next two to five years like we've never seen before," Comey said Tuesday.
The basic argument behind officials' insistence that ISIS will remain a threat even years after losing its grip in Iraq and Syria is that, while losing such regions will negatively impact the group, the bulk of their money lies elsewhere:
"While losing its oil-rich territory in Iraq and its smuggling channels in Syria will diminish the group’s finances, Rasmussen noted that Isis’s major expenses lie in governing the approximately 6 million people residing in its caliphate, not funding operatives – let alone inspiring more, or loosely aiding those it inspires."
The panel also included input from Jeh Johnson, Secretary of Homeland Security, who said his team is working hard to determine a more all-encompassing method of identifying domestic terrorists. For example, several recent terrorism-related incidents have involved post-attack statements in which a specific group takes credit. These incidents, some experts argue, should fall under a different category than attacks that are more clearly ordered to completion by a terrorist group.
