Tracking terrorHouse Homeland Security Committee to release monthly Terror Threat Snapshot

House Homeland Security Committee chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) on Friday released a new Committee product called the Terror Threat Snapshot. McCall said the snapshot is a new, regular monthly feature which tracks “the escalating and grave threat environment” facing the United States. The Terror Threat Snapshot will be kept up to date on the Committee’s Web site. Additionally, monthly summaries will be available.

Key takeaways in this month’s Terror Threat Snapshot include:

• There have been 24 ISIS-linked plots or attacks against Western targets in the first half of 2015, up from 19 in all of last year.
• The number of homegrown terror plots since 9/11 has reached 116, tripling in just the past five years.
• Foreign fighters continue to flow into Syria and Iraq. There has been an 80 percent increase in fighters traveling to the conflict zone since ISIS declared its “caliphate” one year ago.
• More than 200 Americans are believed to have traveled — or attempted to travel — to fight in Syria, a 33 percent increase overall since the beginning of this year.

McCaul said: “Terror threats to the U.S. homeland have reached unprecedented levels. There have been 116 homegrown jihadist plots in America since 9/11 — more than half of those have occurred in just the past three years. Violent Extremism is going viral, but our response to it is moving at bureaucratic, sluggish speed. It is time for President Obama to admit that — in this new age of peer-to-peer terror — we need a real strategy to combat radicalization at home and destroy extremist safe havens abroad.”