You should be wondering the same thing that National
Security and Homeland Security experts are taking seriously.
JRH 9/9/17
***************
Something Else To Fret About: ISIS Mounting Dirty Bombs
On Drones
By Tim Johnson from Special to McClatchy Washington
Bureau
September 8, 2017
Here’s a fear that keeps
counter-terrorism officials up at night: Extremists might use drones to drop
dirty bombs or poison on Western cities.
It could just be a matter of
time before Islamic State fighters take drone usage from the battlefield in
Syria and Iraq to urban areas of the West, security officials say.
“I understand that an openly
available drone, such as a quadcopter, which is able to hold a camera, can drop
some dirty explosive device,” Friedrich Grommes, Germany’s top international
terrorism official, told McClatchy on the sidelines of a national security
forum.
“Even if only a few people
are affected, it serves completely the idea of terrorism,” Grommes added. The
payload would be “something which is poisonous. It could be a chemical or
whatever is commercially available.”
Concerns about such tactics
grew after Australian federal police said on Aug. 3 that they had disrupted an
Islamic State plot to build an “improvised chemical dispersion device” that
terrorists sought to deploy in urban areas. Plotters aimed to spread hydrogen
sulfide, a poisonous gas.
Such a flying dirty bomb
could be attached to a drone and used in Europe or North America,
counter-terrorism officials said.
“That technology hasn’t quite
crossed the Atlantic. It actually hasn’t left the battlefield,” said Chris
Rousseau, director of Canada’s Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre, based in
Ottawa.
Rousseau and other
counter-terror experts spoke at the two-day Intelligence & National
Security Summit 2017 in Washington.
After the panel, Rousseau
spoke further about a drone carrying a terrorist weapon: “The question is at
what point somebody’s going to get the idea to use that here.”
Extremists may not have the
knowhow to manufacture deadly nerve or chemical agents, choosing simpler
chemical components and combining them with an explosive, Grommes said.
“They will refrain from
developing the complex chemical or biological attacks because they want to have
the sudden spectacular blast,” said Grommes, who heads a directorate focused on
international terrorism at Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service, known as the
BND.
Counter-terrorism officials,
speaking about other facets of the war on terrorism, said nations must not get
complacent about a possible strengthening of al-Qaida, the extremist faction
that launched the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, eventually retreating from
Afghanistan to the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa amid sustained U.S.-led
military pressure. The group has been overshadowed by the Islamic State.
In a reversal of al-Qaida’s
earlier tactics, Sheikh Hamza bin Laden, son of the deceased al-Qaida leader
Osama bin Laden, called in May for the group’s followers to embrace the kinds
of “lone wolf attacks” used by Islamic State, its bitter rival, in which
jihadists execute terror operations acting largely on their own and without
direction.
Experts said the latest crop
of terror attacks in Europe were largely carried out by men afflicted by anger
more than driven by religious fanaticism.
Khalid Masood, a 52-year-old
Briton who plowed a car into pedestrians on London’s Westminster Bridge on
March 22, killing five people and injuring 50, left behind writings with
“almost no real ideological content,” said Paddy McGuinness, Britain’s deputy
national security adviser for intelligence, security and resilience.
Attackers find an outlet for
rage in radical interpretations of Islam, McGuinness said.
“They are looking for
something and they stick a sticker on it and they find their justification,”
McGuinness said. “Their grip on their religion is so superficial as to be less
than what you’d get by watching a television documentary.”
Rousseau, the Canadian
official, echoed that belief.
“Religious ideology is very
much the excuse,” Rousseau said, noting that little differentiates the anger of
white supremacists and Islamic radicals.
McGuinness called on
Britain’s allies to do more to remove radical Islamic content from the
internet, where he said it becomes an echo chamber for radicals.
“People can radicalize very,
very quickly,” McGuinness said. Just as some countries bar pedophiles from
putting content on line, he said Western countries need to fight the presence
of extremists online, “not allow them to be there.”
_______________
(c) 2017 McClatchy Washington Bureau
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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