IS ANOTHER 9/11 ATTACK COMING? Number of Middle Aast terrorists trying to enter US skyrocketing – already 360 since Biden took office
DALLAS, TEXAS — “The United States faces a serious threat of a terrorist attack in the months ahead."
That’s the blunt and chilling assessment of former Acting CIA Director Mike Morell.
In an article for the June issue of Foreign Policy magazine titled, “The Terrorism Warning Lights Are Blinking Red Again: Echoes of the Run-Up to 9/11,” Morrell and co-author Graham Allison point to a range of data points.
One of them is the rising number of suspected terrorists trying to enter the United States through the Mexican border.
Earlier this month, eight men from Tajikistan suspected of having ties to the ISIS terror movement were arrested in New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles.
“At least two of the men crossed the border in spring 2023,” NBC News reported, adding: “The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force has been aware of a potential terrorist threat originating in central Europe, and it began monitoring these men as part of that investigation, three sources say.”
While all this sounds like the plot of my most recent political thriller, unfortunately, it’s all too real.
NUMBER OF SUSPECTED TERRORISTS TRYING TO ENTER U.S. IS SURGING
With some 10 million illegal aliens entering the United States over the past four years, the number of foreign nationals – particularly those from Middle Eastern and North African countries – who are on the FBI’s terror watch list and have been arrested trying to infiltrate the American homeland through Mexico has skyrocketed during the Biden administration.
Under former President Donald J. Trump’s four years in office, for example, only 14 suspected foreign terrorists were arrested on the U.S.-Mexico border, according to U.S. Customs & Border Patrol data.
But during the term of President Joe Biden, the number has already hit 360, according to the CBP.
Last year alone, 172 suspected terrorists were captured trying to enter the U.S. illegally.
This year, 80 suspected terrorists have been captured so far, and there are still more than six months to go.
The critical questions are these: How many terrorists have entered the U.S. illegally in recent years without getting caught; what exactly are they planning; and when exactly do they plan to strike?
TOP OFFICIALS ARE “SOUNDING ALARMS”
Morrell and Allison cite Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, who is “sounding similar alarms” to those issued by the U.S. intelligence community back in the summer of 2001.
Last December, Wray told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, “When I sat here last year, I walked through how we were already in a heightened threat environment.”
Yet, after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, he noted, “we’ve seen the threat from foreign terrorists rise to a whole other level.”
In speaking about those threats, “Wray has repeatedly drawn attention to security gaps at the United States’ southern border, where thousands of people each week enter the country undetected,” Morrell and Allison noted.
They added that Christine Abizaid, the outgoing director of the National Counterterrorism Center, described “an elevated global threat environment” while speaking at a conference in Doha last month, and cited recent testimony before the House Judiciary Committee by Attorney General Merrick Garland, who spoke about the possibility of a terrorist attack on the United States, and argued that the “threat level . . . has gone up enormously.”
FACT OR FICTION? NOVEL OR REALITY?
In my latest political thriller, a radical Islamist terrorist leader sends teams of operatives armed with nuclear “dirty” bombs into the United States via the border with Mexico to unleash mass terror attacks designed to make 9/11 pale by comparison.
It’s a concept I developed after former CIA director and former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told me one of the things that he worries about most is the presence of what he calls “ungoverned spaces” along the U.S.-Mexican border.
By this, Pompeo meant that the Mexican government has effectively surrendered large swaths of its northern territory to drug cartels, human traffickers, organized crime syndicates and bad actors of other kinds.
Rather than preventing millions of people from flowing through Mexico and entering the United States illegally, Mexico has basically given up.
That’s dangerous enough, but it’s exponentially more dangerous when you think about terrorists aligned with Iran, Hezbollah, ISIS, the Taliban, and others using these ungoverned spaces to enter the U.S., establish sleeper cells, and then launch cataclysmic attacks.
I wish that it was a far-fetched piece of fiction.
Unfortunately, the premise that Pompeo gave me – and that I developed into a full-length political thriller – is not just chilling, it increasingly seems all too real.
Let’s pray faithfully and without ceasing that the U.S. government takes decisive, immediate, and bipartisan action to counter this growing terror threat – and to seal and protect American borders before it’s too late.
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Joel C. Rosenberg is the editor-in-chief of ALL ISRAEL NEWS and ALL ARAB NEWS and the President and CEO of Near East Media. A New York Times best-selling author, Middle East analyst, and Evangelical leader, he lives in Jerusalem with his wife and sons.
