FBI Considers Homegrown Terrorists Main Threat To National Security

Homegrown radicalized individuals, rather than trained terrorism operatives, are perceived to be the main terrorist threats of 2018 by United States federal law enforcement agencies.

According to a report by Portland Press Herald, FBI Director Christopher Wray reportedly said the law enforcement agency considers homegrown violent extremists as the primary source of terrorist threats to the country. Wray also stated that these extremists could either be motivated by the Islamic State group (ISIS) or other radical groups, or they might be lone attackers who were not affiliated with any groups whatsoever.

Cultists, “sovereign citizens” who think they are not bound by governmental laws and are motivated by racial hatred, are also on the list of possible threats, but concern from them is lesser than the homegrown terrorists, according to the FBI.

Matthew Heiman, a former lawyer with National Security Division at the Department of Justice, also reportedly agreed with Wray's stand on homegrown Islamist extremists being potential terrorist threats.

Citing the attacks in San Bernandino in California, Orlando in Florida, and in New York City, Heiman said “If you look at the numbers, the repetition and the consistency, I think that’s No. 1 by a long stretch.”

However, the report stated that many did not agree with this categorization, and termed it as artificial and counterproductive instead.

Michael German, a former FBI counterterrorism official, said , “There’s this focus on categorizing ideology, rather than focusing on methodology for committing these acts of violence.”

“It springs from this necessity to categorize in order to distribute resources in an organized way, but we then come to believe those categories are real. This whole concept of a radical Islam, which includes very different groups such as ISIS, al-Qaida, Hezbollah… it has nothing to do with keeping Americans safer,” German added.

According to a report by MSN, Wray said the current situation was quite different from a decade ago.

A total of 17 people died in total from five attacks committed by jihadist groups in 2017 throughout the U.S., according to Joshua Freilich, co-creator of the Extremist Crime Database, which is less than the number of people who died due to other domestic extremist groups. Freilich said that according to the database, these kinds of attacks are categorized as ideologically motivated homicides.

According to Heiman, those committing crimes under the banner of ISIS had comparably low fatalities as compared to the attacks done by trained terrorist teams.

Heiman went on to say, “al-Qaida was planning these epic, dramatic attacks. You compare that to the Islamic State, and their approach is ‘here’s what we’d like, you go out and figure out how to do it.’”

He added, “So then you get individuals picking up whatever they can, bats or cars or firearms, without a lot of training in how to get those mass casualties.”

Heiman also said although it was less likely for an incident like 9/11 to happen again, attacks by individuals were quite difficult to identify before they happened.

According to German, radicalized individuals in most cases had already planned to commit a violent action and were just searching for an ideology to justify their actions.