As the dust settled on Sunday’s attack in Garland, Texas that left the two gunmen dead and a policemen wounded, terrorism analysts were left to examine links between the shooters and the world’s most notorious Islamist militant group, the Islamic State.
The notion that the Islamic State is operating an intricate network of operatives in the U.S. appears to be overblown but that doesn’t mean that attacks like the one in Garland are out of the question.
Initial links between the shooters and the Islamic State appear scant at best. Elton Simpson had been investigated by the FBI and arrested in January 2010, a few months after telling an informant that he was planning on traveling to Somalia to join the al-Qaeda affiliated Al-Shabab. He had however interacted with various Islamic State supporters or members through the internet.
“The FBI has found private communications between Simpson and some prominent terrorists whom he also had public exchanges with on Twitter including Jenaid Hussein, a British national tied to ISIS and Mohamed Abdullahi Hassan, an American now believed to be in Somalia and part of that country’s al Qaeda affiliate al Shabaab, according to one law enforcement official,” CNN reported.
The Islamic State, also referred to as ISIS or ISIL, is reported to have claimed credit for the attack over their radio channel and a note posted to the justpaste.it website on Tuesday also stated that the attack was perpetrated by “the Islamic State in America.”
The note in particular said that the Islamic State has trained operatives ready to carry out attacks around the United States. “We have 71 trained soldiers in 15 different states ready at our word to attack any target we desire,” the note read, adding that 23 operatives have signed up for attacks. It also named five states — Virginia, Maryland, Illinois, California, and Michigan — as places it was prepared to strike.
Furthermore, the Pentagon “raised its protection levels a notch on Friday for military bases across the country in response to threats from ISIL,” a Defense department official told USA Today.
Yet these pieces of information aside, terrorism and national security analysts interviewed by ThinkProgress unanimously said that post-attack announcements were likely attempts at aggrandizing connections to the Islamic State.
The Islamic State has encouraged sympathizers and followers to carry out lone-wolf attacks in the West. And it seems that Simpson and his roommate Nadir Soofi were inspired by such calls, leading to their interactions with men like Hussein and Hassan.
It is unlikely that anyone in the Islamic State’s leadership, based out of strongholds in Syria’s Raqqa and Iraq’s Mosul, were aware of the Texas attack beforehand. This is indicative of the evolving structure of militant groups aimed at attacking more powerful countries and targets.
Past threats of attacks on the U.S. have come from groups with skeletal structures that had a clear leader and infrastructure. But this skeletal structure has given way to looser, more cellular structures that are harder to map.
“The terrorist threat is more decentralized, more diffuse, more complicated. It involves the potential lone wolf actor, it involves the effective use of social media, the Internet,” Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson told reporters last month following the arrest of two New York women accused of planning an Islamic State inspired bomb attack.
The Islamic State’s inner circle of commanders, and to a large extent their presence in Syria and Iraq, is skeletal. But these operatives outside the area the Islamic State deems their caliphate likely have little interaction with the group apart from online interactions with individual operatives.
That means that despite claims of an organized network of deadly operatives, the claims put forward on Tuesday in the justpaste.it note are more than a rouse. A deadly attack that recalls 9/11 appears to be beyond the capabilities of the so-called Islamic militants roaming inside American borders. But that doesn’t mean there is no danger at hand.
If future attacks are to take place, it is likely that they will be smaller scale in the same vein as last Sunday’s. Whether that manifests in lone or paired gunmen attacking specified targets, building improvised explosive devices (IEDs), or simply the arrest of these self-proclaimed jihadists, is yet to be seen.