ied a couple of years ago to inspire an attack in New York but the FBI interrupted. Then there was an attack in Stockholm in 2017 that killed five people, he added. “So they certainly have a desire and the propaganda would indicate that they want to conduct attacks outside of Afghanistan as far relatively limited,” the counter-terrorism official said.
According to Travers, after 9/11, the US was primarily focused on an externally directed attack capability emanating from a single piece of real estate along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. “Eighteen years later, we face a homegrown violent extremist threat, almost 20 ISIS branches and networks that range from tens to hundreds to thousands of people, al-Qaeda and its branches and affiliates, foreign fighters that flocked to Iraq and Syria from well over 100 countries, Iran and its proxies, and there is a growing terrorist threat from racially and ethnically motivated extremists around the globe,” he said.
By any calculation, there are far more radicalised individuals now than there were at the time of 9/11, Travers told the lawmakers. “This highlights the importance of terrorism prevention. While some aspects of the threat can only be dealt with through kinetic operations, the residents of the ideology will not be dealt with by military or law enforcement operations alone. The world has a lot of work to do in the non-kinetic realm to deal with radicalization and underlying causes,” he added. Travers also said that al-Qaeda retains its long-standing ties to the Haqqani Network and other militant networks active in Afghanistan and Pakistan that frequently target US personnel.