“ISIS is not finished with us yet”: Arrested Tajiks underline US fears of terrorist attacks on the USA

CNN
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The recent arrest of eight Tajik nationals suspected of having ties to ISIS has heightened concerns among national security officials that a dangerous offshoot of the now-fragmented terrorist group could potentially carry out an attack on American soil, several US officials told CNN.

Members of the group initially entered the United States through the southern border and applied for asylum under U.S. immigration law. It is unclear whether they entered the country at the same time and place.

By the time intelligence about ISIS targets abroad linked the men to the terror group, they had already been vetted by immigration authorities and allowed into the country, officials said.

While there is no hard evidence that they were sent to the United States as part of a terrorist attack, at least some of the Tajik nationals displayed extremist rhetoric in their communications – whether on social media or in direct private messages that U.S. intelligence was able to monitor – three officials said.

That discovery sparked a flurry of investigations by federal officials and analysts across the country, sources said, including physical and electronic surveillance of the men – a counterterrorism operation reminiscent of the years immediately after Sept. 11, when the FBI investigated numerous domestic attacks.

After a period of surveillance, federal officials faced a difficult decision in the final days: either continue monitoring the men to determine if they were part of a possible plot or larger terror network, or get them off the streets. Rather than risk the worst-case scenario of a possible attack, senior U.S. officials decided to step in and have ICE agents arrest the men, a source told CNN.

The men remain in federal custody on immigration charges and will ultimately be deported once the anti-terrorism investigation against them is completed.

Particularly troubling to U.S. officials was that the men were from Tajikistan, a region of Central Asia that has been a source of steady recruitment in recent years by ISIS-K, the Afghanistan-based affiliate of the Islamist terror group. ISIS-K is led primarily by Tajiks who have carried out a series of recent attacks in Europe on behalf of the group, including the attack on Moscow’s Crocus Hall in March that killed more than 100 people.

National security officials fear that at least some of the eight Tajiks could easily have been radicalized by ISIS-K while in the United States and may have struggled with isolation, financial stress or discrimination – all factors that could make a person vulnerable to violent ISIS propaganda.

Senior officials now view a so-called “lone wolf” who appears to emerge from nowhere as the more likely – and potentially equally dangerous – threat, rather than the more traditional, coordinated attack carried out by trained agents.

Compared to terrorist networks, whose communications can provide opportunities for surveillance, individuals who do not disclose their attack plans to anyone pose an even greater challenge for security authorities.

“We cannot assume that all of the above are not true,” a senior U.S. official said. “It is too early to know everything we want to know about the depth and structure of the connections that may exist between these eight individuals and ISIS.”

This incident occurred as senior intelligence officials are publicly warning that the global situation has raised the risk of a terrorist attack on American soil to the highest level in living memory. At the same time, many national security officials acknowledge that American troop withdrawals from Afghanistan and other parts of the Middle East have reduced intelligence gathering on traditional terrorist threats.

“It’s no secret that since we’ve withdrawn troops, we’ve been collecting less intelligence in various places around the world. We always knew we were making that trade-off,” the senior US official said.

Former CIA deputy director Michael Morell co-authored a widely circulated article in Foreign Affairs magazine this week warning that the warning lights for terrorism are now “flashing red,” echoing a recent warning from FBI Director Christopher Wray, who said he sees “flashing lights everywhere I look.”

“The combination of the stated intentions of terrorist groups, the growing capabilities they have demonstrated in recent successful and failed attacks around the world, and the fact that several serious plots have been thwarted in the United States leads us to an uncomfortable but inescapable conclusion,” the Foreign Affairs article states. “To put it simply: The United States faces a serious threat of terrorist attack in the coming months.”

Intelligence officials are well aware of the gaps in intelligence gathering in Afghanistan, where ISIS-K is primarily based. Although officials believe ISIS-K is primarily trying to radicalize and inspire attackers rather than train and deploy operatives, the group’s rise is a relatively new phenomenon. That means there is much U.S. counterterrorism analysts don’t know about its strategy, recruitment efforts and operational tactics.

U.S. officials and analysts who closely monitor Islamist terror groups know that ISIS-K has dramatically increased its online propaganda machine. Rather than training and deploying fighters – as al-Qaeda did in the 9/11 attacks, for example – ISIS-K has instead focused on radicalizing vulnerable populations. Tajikistan, for example, is one of the poorest countries in the world and its population faces extreme religious oppression – both factors that terrorism experts say can make a population vulnerable to radicalization.

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Terrorism researcher Colin Clarke said the group was developing “charismatic propaganda” to “reach diasporas already existing in Europe, North America and the Central Asian region and inspire people to carry out attacks.”

“It seems to be only a matter of time before they can pull something off successfully,” Clarke said.

The arrests also highlight vulnerabilities along the U.S. southern border, an issue that Republicans have increasingly addressed in the midst of a presidential election year.

“We are literally living on borrowed time,” Oklahoma Republican Senator James Lankford said on the Senate floor on Wednesday during a speech about the threat posed by terrorists entering the United States across the southern border.

A report released on June 7 by the DHS Inspector General found that asylum seekers were not always screened in a timely manner and that border agents did not have access to all the federal data they needed to screen noncitizens seeking entry to the United States.

The US runs the risk of admitting dangerous individuals or allowing asylum seekers who could pose a significant threat to public safety and national security to continue to stay in the United States, the report said.

Since last summer, US authorities have been paying particular attention to immigrants from Central Asian countries, including Tajikistan. It later emerged that a smuggler with links to IS had helped a group of Uzbek citizens who had crossed the southern border to enter the USA.

This incident triggered a sensational effort by the US government to track down and investigate these individuals.

Two U.S. officials also said this has spurred national security agencies to ensure that immigration and intelligence agencies adequately monitor all travelers from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

“I think the incident with the Uzbek nationals last summer indicated that the population of Central Asia may be a cause for concern given what we currently know about the global ISIS network,” the senior U.S. official said.

In 2023, CBP reported 169 encounters with individuals identified as “potential matches” to names on the terrorist watch list.

But that’s not a reliable measure of the number of terrorists who might try to enter the United States, U.S. officials argue. When a name appears on a terrorist watch list, it can mean all sorts of things: The person could have a very loose, attenuated connection to a known terrorist. Or they could belong to an established terrorist group like the FARC, which is not known to carry out attacks on U.S. soil. Or they could simply have a similar name to someone who is a legitimate cause for concern.

That’s what happened to the Jordanian national who was arrested outside the gates of the U.S. naval base in Quantico earlier this year, two U.S. officials said. Although his name appeared on one of the wanted lists, it turned out to be a “poor match,” the senior U.S. official said.

The conflation of crime and terrorism is also often difficult for law enforcement to detect in poor countries like Tajikistan. For example, a person may have regular contact with a family member who has done paid work for ISIS without having any sympathy for the group themselves.

But the risk is there, says Clarke: “Crushing poverty and an extremely religious population oppressed by their leaders – that is a perfect recipe for exporting jihadists.”

The law enforcement agency said: “It has become a cliché, but it remains the absolute truth: We may be done with ISIS, but ISIS is not done with us.”