It was only a matter of time before anti-terror authorities reported that radicalized American or immigrant Muslims had returned home to the U.S. after taking up arms with ISIS in Iraq or Syria.
A ranking Obama administration aide revealed as much on Monday, setting the stage for what must be unflagging surveillance, a drive to prosecute the returned jihadists to the fullest and a rewrite of federal law and policies to raise defenses. The rule should be:
If you go to Syria or Iraq to fight as an unauthorized civilian, you are not coming home to the U.S.
Responding to the White House disclosure, NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence John Miller said that the department and the Joint Terrorism Task Force are looking at “a small number of people . . . in the New York area” who are suspected of having gone to Syria to support factions in the civil war there other than ISIS.
“Beyond that, if evidence is developed that a person worked for or fought for a designated terrorist organization, they will be prosecuted.”
Everyone now knows — no one more than NYPD brass — that even a lone wolf can do huge damage, and the possibility for harm rises exponentially if a would-be terrorist has gotten sophisticated training of the kind that ISIS is fully equipped to provide.
In an ultra-sobering assessment of the terror threat published in Sunday’s Daily News, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton noted that an ISIS-affiliated gunman had killed three people in an attack on the Jewish Museum in Belgium, while another was busted in France mixing explosives.
Just as frightening, Australian police last week arrested 15 people in alleged connection with a plot to publicly behead someone selected at random in Sydney. Closer to home, federal prosecutors indicted a Rochester man on charges of conspiring to support ISIS and murder members of the U.S. military who had returned from Iraq.
The dots come scarily into focus as a picture of ISIS as a remarkably media-savvy organization whose message is getting powerfully through to a segment of the American Muslim population, from which conscripts are making pilgrimages to fight for creation of a supposedly pure Islamic caliphate where order is maintained through beheadings, mass rape and massacres.
The better to recruit Western jihadists, the blood-soaked propagandists gave an apparently British killer center stage in the videos of the beheadings of Americans James Foley and Steven Sotloff and Brit David Haines. On Friday, an ISIS video featured a figure who spoke with a North American accent as men dug a ditch.
“You can see them digging their own graves in the very place where they were stationed,” the jihadi proclaimed.
President Obama is scheduled to appear personally before the United Nations Security Council to urge the panel to call on UN member countries to enact global bans on traveling to fight in foreign wars and to impose sanctions on nations that refused to do so.
He will also reportedly push the UN to freeze the assets of “foreign terrorist fighters” by placing them on sanctions lists and will ask Interpol to monitor transit across several countries. All good and necessary actions.
As for immediately beefing up U.S. security, Obama should add the names of Americans and resident immigrants who fight in Syria or Iraq to no-fly lists and establish protocols for stripping the passports of those who join up with ISIS.
The barbarians are urging war on the U.S. and extreme harm to this homeland. Enlisting with them is akin to treason.
