How Vulnerable Is The United States To A Brussels-Like Attack?

The apparently coordinated bombings that killed more than 30 people in Belgium are unlikely to be duplicated in the United States, which is separated by an ocean from Islamic extremists fighting in Syria and Iraq and has seen far fewer of its people traveling there, former intelligence and counterterrorism officials said.

America is not immune from terrorist attacks, as December's Islamic State-inspired mass shooting in San Bernardino demonstrated, and its transit systems, particularly city subways, are vulnerable. But the U.S. is not grappling with the same volume of Islamic State recruits as its European peers, and sophisticated plots are far more likely to be ferreted out by law enforcement or neighbors, the officials said.

"In the U.S., for the most part, communities don't radicalize; individuals do," said Seamus Hughes, the deputy director at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University's Center for Cyber & Homeland Security and a former National Counterterrorism Center staffer.

The Islamic State, also known as ISIS, claimed responsibility for the Brussels attacks - a series of bombings at the airport and a metro station. The incident sparked security fears across the globe, with police in Paris, London, Washington and elsewhere boosting patrols. The bombing followed earlier Islamic State assaults in France, Turkey and Tunisia, among other places

According to a report from The Soufan Group, a research and intelligence service, 470 people from Belgium had traveled to Syria as of October 2015. That figure, officials said, represents the highest per capita number of foreign fighters for any country.

The U.S. has had about 250 Americans who have tried to travel, and that includes those who never made it. Charles Kurzman, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who tracks Muslim American terrorism suspects, said he has found only 42 who successfully traveled to join militants in Syria, Iraq or Libya, and of those, only 16 remain in military territory. Six were arrested or otherwise taken into custody and 20 died. Dozens have been prosecuted in the U.S.

"I think it's fair to say that Belgium authorities are overwhelmed with the numbers they're dealing with," Hughes said. "They have twice the number of foreign fighters than we have people who have attempted to travel."

Republican presidential candidates struck a more alarmist tone. Ohio governor John Kasich called on President Obama to return from his visit to Cuba and suggested the U.S. "send teams of people immediately to Europe to begin to dig, in terms of what we need to do to address the vulnerabilities we have." Texas Senator Ted Cruz said the U.S. should "empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized." And Donald Trump predicted flatly: "This is going to happen in the United States."

Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton said the U.S. should "intensify and broaden our strategy" in fighting the Islamic State, and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders called the attack a "brutal reminder that the international community must come together to destroy ISIS."

The U.S. is not without vulnerabilities. Earlier this month, Mohamad Khweis, an Alexandria, Va., man who was not previously on the FBI radar was picked up by Kurdish forces in Iraq after he apparently fled the Islamic State.

A recently retired FBI counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss recent bureau operations, said aspiring jihadists are getting smarter, and are no longer flying directly to Turkey before making their way to the Islamic State in Syria. "Now they are using different countries," the official said. In the case of Khweis, he said he traveled to London, Amsterdam and Turkey before sneaking into Syria.

Encryption, the official said, can also thwart the FBI from tracking suspects. "Known targets have gone dark," the official said. "That's a huge blind spot for us."

The FBI is still trying to decrypt the many communications that took place between an Arizona man named Elton Simpson and a senior Islamic State operative. The two were trading messages just prior to the man's attack last year on a "Draw Muhammad" cartoon contest in Texas. Simpson and another man were killed by police outside the venue in Garland, Tex.

A third person involved in the plot, Abdul Malik Abdul Kareem, was convicted earlier this month of providing material support to the Islamic State.

"People who are plotting to harm America and Americans are no longer a world away," Justin Tolomeo, the FBI's acting special agent in charge in Phoenix, said in a statement after a jury convicted Kareem.

U.S. law enforcement appears to have a robust network of informants in places where terrorist plots might be incubated, and American Muslims, unlike some communities in Europe, are well integrated and in many cases tip off the authorities, former counterterrorism officials said.

The main threat facing law enforcement is the individual who falls under the sway of Islamic State propaganda and then decides to carry out an attack without any direction from Syria, officials said.

That has happened repeatedly since the rise of the Islamic State in 2014. The most recent occurred in San Bernardino, where a husband and wife pledged their allegiance to the Islamic State on Facebook and then gunned down 14 people and wounded 22 more. The couple was killed in a shootout with police.

Most recently, the FBI said that a University of California at Merced student who stabbed four people was "self-radicalized" but didn't have any ties to a terrorism a group. A campus police officer killed the 18-year-old student.

Belgium, by contrast, has only just begun coming to grips with its terrorism problem, and police and intelligence agencies there are dealing with an "overwhelming" number of matters to look into, said Matthew Levitt, a former U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism official who now directs The Washington Institute's Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence.

Levitt, who was in Brussels last week meeting with top counterterrorism and intelligence officials, said the country's open borders, lack of intelligence in isolated Muslim communities and sub-par intelligence sharing with European neighbors creates a dangerous brew. He said the arrest of Paris attack suspect Salah Abdeslam, who eluded capture for months, demonstrates "clearly there was a larger support network" than Belgian authorities anticipated, and their counter radicalization efforts seem to be insufficient to address the depth of the problem.

"The Belgians, over the past year, have been caught by surprise a bit that they are a target," Levitt said. "That's not a surprise anymore. I think the realization now is that the pace of the response has to be picked up significantly, and that has to be both raiding safe houses and getting into these neighborhoods and addressing the things that make people feel so disconnected."

© 2016 The Washington Post 

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