ISIS Exposed: Beheadings, Slavery, and the Hellish Reality of Radical Islam (12 page)

Former longtime CIA clandestine services officer Brian Fairchild gave me a chilling assessment of the threat posed by these American jihadists once they return home from the Islamic State:

          
ISIS’s American recruits pose an extremely dangerous threat to the American homeland. Many of them have direct combat experience during which they have honed their military skills. They’ve killed during combat, and they’ve executed captives, raped and enslaved women, and beheaded their enemies. They are religious zealots who believe that they are fighting a holy war against the United States, which they consider to be the premier enemy of their religion. Worse, they believe that Allah directly commands them to kill us. Armed with this sanction they have no moral red line, and will not hesitate to commit the same heinous crimes here.
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Perhaps some of these ISIS returnees will form a cell and attempt a Mumbai-style attack—a very plausible scenario that Western intelligence officials have long been concerned about. In a 2008 jihad attack in Mumbai,
India, ten well-trained young Pakistani terrorists—each armed with assault rifles and bombs—spread out across the streets of the world’s second-largest city and slaughtered 164 people while wounding over three hundred more. Jihadists everywhere took note. In October 2013, four Muslim men were arrested in London on charges that they were plotting to carry out a Mumbai-like attack in Britain. In
The Terrorist Next Door
I described the effects such an assault on American soil could have:

          
The Mumbai operation presented an appealing package to the jihadist world. It garnered massive media coverage and dominated the international news cycle for nearly a week. It was cheap, low-tech, and didn’t take much manpower to pull off, yet it still caused immense carnage and crippled the world’s second-largest city for days. It also created the kind of psychological terror and economic damage that Islamic terrorist groups yearn for, and showed how a major city could be completely unprepared for a coordinated onslaught by jihadi foot soldiers. . . . How many lives would be lost, how much devastation would ensue, before a ten-man team of well-armed, well-trained jihadists could be subdued in a city like Columbus, Ohio? Local police would take them on at first. The FBI, SWAT, and potentially even the National Guard would later rush to the scene. Eventually the situation would be brought under control—but not before many people were killed and countless more wounded.
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The Mumbai blueprint was utilized to devastating effect by Somali terrorists in Kenya on September 21, 2013, but with a despicable new twist. A small band of heavily armed jihadists from the al Qaeda–linked terror group al-Shabaab fanned out, not across a city neighborhood, but throughout Nairobi’s upscale Westgate shopping mall, a destination frequented by Western tourists. They slaughtered at least sixty-seven people, including
several Westerners, and wounded hundreds more during a gruesome four-day siege that left the mall in ruins (it has never reopened). The terrorists intentionally targeted non-Muslims for death during the siege, asking hostages to name the Islamic prophet Mohammed’s relatives or recite the
shahada,
the Muslim profession of faith. If hostages answered incorrectly, exposing themselves as non-Muslims, they were immediately killed. Al-Shabaab later said it carried out “a meticulous vetting process,” to ensure that Muslims would not be killed and only “kuffar” would be targeted.
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It is no stretch to say that America is completely unprepared for a Westgate-style attack on a crowded suburban mall by a team of ISIS terrorists during the height of the Christmas shopping season. In fact, a Mumbai- or Westgate-type cell is not necessary to create bedlam in an American city or town. Think of the carnage wrought at Fort Hood by a lone Islamic terrorist, Nidal Hasan, who massacred thirteen of his fellow soldiers while yelling, “Allahu Akbar.” And the Boston bombings were carried out by a pair of brothers who managed to kill four people, wound some 264 more, and shut down the city of Boston for the better part of a week, grabbing international media coverage.

Fort Hood and Boston represented what I call “chip away” attacks: smaller-scale, low-tech acts of terrorism that can nevertheless chip away at America’s psyche and security if carried out on a regular basis. Al Qaeda has advocated this “death by a thousand cuts” strategy for years now, urging Western Muslims to act alone if necessary to become a one-man (or -woman) jihad, à la Nidal Hasan, against soft targets in the United States such as buses, trains, outdoor cafés, and shopping malls. ISIS is making a similar call to Muslims in the West—and with much greater effect than al Qaeda ever dreamed.

Consider the chaos that unfolded at a chocolate café in Sydney, Australia, over a sixteen-hour span in December 2014, when fifty-year-old Man Haron Monis—an Iranian-born ISIS sympathizer and jihadist rabble-rouser who had long been on Australian authorities’ radar screen—held
seventeen hostages at gunpoint. During the siege Monis forced the hostages to hold up the black flag of jihad in the café’s window. Australian police eventually stormed the café and killed Monis, but not before the terrorist was able to murder two of his hostages.
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As we’ll explore further in
chapter five
, the Islamic State’s ubiquitous in-your-face social media presence, horror movie violence, and stunning battlefield successes—culminating in the declaration of the long-awaited caliphate—have galvanized radicalized Muslims across North America, Europe, and beyond, as we saw in Sydney.

If potential “lone wolves” needed any extra motivation, they received it in a September 2014 audio release. ISIS spokesman Abu Mohammad al-Adnani urged Muslims in the West, “If you can kill a disbelieving American or European—especially the spiteful and filthy French—or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State . . . kill him in any manner or way however it may be.”
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ISIS jihadists have also encouraged their followers in the United States to track down American soldiers online and from their personal information on social media, then go to their homes and slaughter them.
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The threats only promise to increase as the United States increases its military involvement against the Islamic State caliphate.

The ultimate aim here for ISIS is a jihadist guerilla war—carried out mainly by homegrown “lone wolves”—that will turn America into a battlefield. Bear in mind that there have already been over sixty Islamic terror plots against America since 9/11 and that the overwhelming majority of them have been homegrown.
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As we saw in the days and weeks immediately following the release of al-Adnani’s audiotape on September 21, 2014, there is no shortage of budding Western
mujahideen
willing and eager to answer ISIS’s call and take up the mantle of domestic holy war:

On September 25, 2014, at a food-processing plant in Oklahoma, an American grandmother was beheaded by a Muslim radical. That vicious jihadist attack, which we’ll discuss in more detail in
chapter four
, was carried out by an ISIS sympathizer and generated national outrage. What you may not have heard is that in the very same week when the beheading took place and in the very same town—Moore, Oklahoma—an Arab man walked into a local high school and started asking some very peculiar questions. According to the Daily Caller,

          
A fortysomething Middle Eastern man described as having a thick Arabic accent waltzed into Moore High School in Moore, Okla. without authorization last week and asked a number of “suspicious” questions, according to police. . . . The man, who entered the school without permission through an unlocked door and then made his way into the cafeteria, queried two students and a teacher.

                
. . . the man wanted to know the number of police officers who work at the school on a regular basis and the location of the closest police department. The odd question-asking incident lasted only a couple minutes. Then, apparently, the man disappeared.

According to Jeremy Lewis, a spokesman for the Moore police department, it was “very concerning that he was able to enter the school unannounced, unconfronted, that’s concerning. That’s something that has to be fixed.”
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Yes, I would say the security situation at Moore High School needs some fixin’. And fast: “The
incident, which was caught on surveillance video, was not reported to police for two days, according to Fox affiliate KOKH
[emphasis added].”

Although police would not identify the Middle Eastern man and said he faced no criminal charges, the FBI was notified about the incident and it was reportedly under investigation.
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Police added that the man was not a threat and that his incursion onto school property had no connection to the nearby jihadist beheading that week—which the same Moore Police Department described, memorably, as an act of “workplace violence.” Move along, nothing to see here.

Why should we be concerned? Well, consider the horrific three-day siege at Beslan, North Ossetia, in 2004. Terrorists, mainly from Chechnya and surrounding Muslim areas in Russia’s Caucasus region, seized an elementary school in the town of Beslan in southern Russia. The ensuing hostage standoff ended in a nightmarish bloodbath that shocked and revolted the world. Three hundred and thirty-four people, including 186 children and many parents, were killed after being subjected to days of hellish abuse by their terrorist captors.

The possibility of a Beslan-style school siege has caused some restless nights for U.S. intelligence types and terrorism analysts as well as members of Congress who are regularly briefed on the terror threat. I’m based inside the Beltway and speak with such folks on a regular basis. In the decade-plus since Beslan, the school siege scenario has frequently come up in conversations as a serious concern. It’s not hard to see why.

On September 23, 2014, just two days after ISIS spokesman Abu Mohammad al-Adnani released his call for lone wolf terror attacks, specifically mentioning Australia, an eighteen-year-old Afghan native brutally knifed two Australian counterterrorism police. Abdul Numan Haider was summoned to meet with counterterrorism agents at a Melbourne police station because of his suspected ties to terrorism. When the ISIS sympathizer was greeted outside the station by two agents, he promptly attacked them with a knife, seriously wounding one of them with slashes to the neck, head, and stomach. The other agent shot and killed Haider before the teenage jihadist could carry out his full plan “to stab the cops, behead them, wrap their bodies in the Islamic State flag and post photos of the killings online.” Authorities found another, larger knife and an ISIS flag on Haider’s body.
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