The House Homeland Security Committee’s monthly assessment of the growing threat of terrorism in the United States found Monday that “cases of homegrown extremism in the United States continue to increase” with 199 ISIS linked plots to attack Western targets since 2013. Twenty-one of these plots were in the first four months of 2017.
The Committee also found that in the past 12 months there have been 39 homegrown jihadist cases in 20 states and 209 cases in America since September 11th, 132 of these involved ISIS related arrests.
House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rep. McCaul (R-TX) commented that “as we near the alarming 200-mark for ISIS-linked plots against the West, there is a noticeable shift in the group’s directives.”
“With the so-called ISIS ‘caliphate’ in the Middle East deteriorating, jihadists are increasingly told to stay where they are and carry out attacks at home,” he warned. “The shooting in France just before their country’s election illustrates ISIS’ attempts to instill fear and disrupt Western life.”
The report outlined recent cases of homegrown terrorist plots including the case of Laith Waleed Alebbini who was arrested as he tried to travel from Chicago to Turkey to join ISIS.
It also noted that since 2013 there have been “63 cases recorded by the Committee where ISIS used or attempted to build or use explosives to carry out an attack in the West or against western targets” with five of these cases occurring just this year.
Despite European intelligence efforts to fight increasing extremist violence, “the ISIS-inspired attack in Stockholm marked Europe’s fourth attack in which the group used a vehicle as a weapon against a crowd in the last 12 months. An ISIS attack on the police in the middle of a Parisian tourist attraction came at a particularly sensitive time for the country, just days before voters went to the polls in the first round of the French presidential election.”
The report was produced by the House Homeland Security Committee Majority staff from open source material information such as media reports, publicly available government statements, and nongovernmental assessments.