TerrorismWestern intelligence agencies a step behind ISIS operations in the West

A former U.S. intelligence officer has warned that the intelligence community tasked with the responsibility of protecting the United States from terror attacks is failing when it comes to the Islamic State.

Derek Harvey, who worked as a top intelligence agent and advisor on Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, told the Telegraph that the CIA and other spy agencies have drawn dangerously flawed conclusions about the jihadist group.

The prevailing belief in the intelligence community was that the terror organisation was focusing its activities to Syria and Iraq. The isolated attacks in the West were believed to be isolated events that were not connected with the parent organisation.

This belief was disproven when ISIS launched a coordinated attack on several targets in Paris.

Harvey insists that far from being lone wolves, perpetrators of attacks in the West were part of a command structure. He said, “Their intent is to strike with organized decentralised operations focused on the West. This isn’t just lone wolves inspired by propaganda. This is coordinated.”

He said that ISIS behaved differently to Al Qaeda, which focuses on bigger, high profile attacks. It was for this reason that the intelligence agencies had underestimated the ISIS threat. The Islamic State’s modus operandi, he says, involves many small-scale attacks whose general purpose is to cause havoc and mayhem in the Western society.

“ISIL understands that it doesn’t have to be a complicated and or complex operation like 9/11. ISIL will put a bomb in a taxi and then send the taxi someplace, and driver won’t know he is carrying the explosive,” Harvey said.

Harvey also said that the organisational set up of the intelligence agencies is at fault for the continued attacks on the West. He described institutions and agencies in which little importance is given to experience, with key positions focused on the Middle East being filled by young people who had never been to the countries they were analyzing. Little attention has been paid, he said, to the jihadists’ ideology and literature.

He noted that as was evident in the 13 November attacks in Paris, the jihadists will seek to attack in the grey zones of a country’s social makeup, looking to increase tensions between Muslims and other religious groups, or between immigrant and non-immigrant communities.

Their propaganda is also aimed to radicalize individuals so that they can carry out localized attacks in different areas. Unlike other extremist groups like Al Qaeda, which affilates with other groups, ISIS is more particular when it comes to partnering with other groups. For example, the Telegraph notes, it took several months of negotiations before ISIS partnered with Boko Haram. When it comes to partnerships with individual volunteers, however, ISIS appears to be less selective.

This feature of ISIS’s approach, and the large numbers of individuals in the West who support ISIS, make it difficult successfully to track ISIS supporters over a long period, and the intelligence agencies are yet to find a way to do this successfully.