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The Khorasan Group Should Scare Us
(Politico) Matthew Levitt - More of a cell or network than a distinct group, Khorasan operates in Syria under the umbrella of the local al-Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, but it appears to function independently of Nusra and report back to al-Qaeda senior leadership in Pakistan. U.S. officials say the network only emerged on the ground in Syria over the past year, its members dispatched there by al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri for the express purpose of using the vacuum created by the war in Syria to "develop external attacks, construct and test improvised explosive devices and recruit Westerners to conduct operations," according to a BBC report. U.S. officials now see the Khorasan group as the primary al-Qaeda entity plotting near-term attacks against the West. By September, a Pentagon spokesman said, intelligence reports indicated the Khorasan group was "in the final stages of plans to execute major attacks." Before moving to Syria last spring, Khorasan head Mohsen al-Fadhli, a longtime al-Qaeda operative, had been living in Iran, where he served as al-Qaeda's "senior facilitator" overseeing a network who were "working to move fighters and money through Turkey to support al-Qaeda-affiliated elements in Syria," according to the State Department. With ISIL commanding all the attention, al-Qaeda appears especially keen on carrying out an attack to prove its continued relevance. The writer is director of the Stein Program on Counterterrorism & Intelligence at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.