Other groups may pose more danger than ISIS: US officials
Asharq Al-Awsat Monday, 22 Sep, 2014
http://www.aawsat.net/2014/09/article55336858

London and Riyadh, Asharq Al-Awsat—Other extremist groups operating in Syria
may pose a greater threat to US national security than the Islamic State of
Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a number of US government and intelligence officials
have said.

Speaking to the New York Times, the officials highlighted one group, called
“Khorasan,” that is reportedly made up of former Al-Qaeda members previously
involved in, or currently intent on, carrying out attacks on US soil using
concealed explosives.

The group is said to be led by Mohsin Al-Fadhli, a 33-year-old Kuwaiti
national who as well as being wanted in his native homeland has been on US
terror lists for at least a decade, and is the fourth most-wanted man on
Saudi Arabia’s list of wanted terrorist suspects.

According to the US State Department, Fadhli entered Syria via Iran in 2013,
having lived in the country with a small group of Al-Qaeda operatives.

A number of informed sources in the British capital London said Fadhli was
now effectively the leader of Al-Qaeda in Syria, acting as the main
representative of the group’s global leader, Ayman Al-Zawahiri. They said
Fadhli had played a pivotal role in convincing Zawahiri to declare the
Al-Nusra Front as Al-Qaeda’s official branch in Syria, at the expense of
ISIS.

Details on Fadhli and Khorasan are sketchy, with the officials saying the
picture on the ground in Syria remained highly opaque due to the “growing
body of extremists from around the world who are coming in and taking
advantage of the ungoverned areas and creating informal ad hoc groups that
are not directly aligned with ISIS or Nusra,” according to one of the
officials who spoke to the New York Times.

Many of these groups, especially the Al-Nusra Front, have been weakened by
ISIS’s recent successes, losing not only territory but also fighters to the
group, whose sophisticated propaganda machine and recent stunning successes,
including unilaterally declaring a caliphate, have proved a magnet for many
recruits that would otherwise have fought for Al-Nusra and others.

The officials warned it was this complicated state of affairs, where
weakening one group may strengthen a more dangerous rival, meant the latest
US-led efforts against ISIS could backfire drastically. The weakening of
ISIS—which has thus far confined its operations to Syria and Iraq and not
targeted Western countries—could therefore result in other groups, such as
the Al-Nusra Front, Khorasan, and still others bent on attacking Western
states, coming to the fore.

Hani Al-Sebaee, an expert on extremist groups, and head of the Al-Maqrizi
Center for Historical Studies in London, told Asharq Al-Awsat via telephone
the US officials were possibly “blowing things out of proportion regarding
Khorasan, a new enemy we don’t know much about in terms of facts on the
ground.”

He said he believed the goal of the latest “leaks” from the US regarding the
group could be a kind of smokescreen to encourage an attack on the Al-Nusra
Front, which, unlike ISIS is part of a group that has already attacked the
US.