June 14, 2017 | Quoted Thomas Seibert - The Arab Weekly
As pressure on IS grows, Western officials see terror threat ‘metastasizing’
As forces of an international coalition squeeze the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Western officials said they are bracing for a heightened terror threat by battle-hardened foreign fighters returning home amid the demolition of the IS caliphate.
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Robert Gates, a former U.S. defense secretary, said he expects IS to “metastasize” and become “more active and more aggressive in a variety of places in the West.”
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Gates said that while a defeat of IS in Mosul and Raqqa was important, it would be wrong to talk about an overall victory because “people leave, scurry away from those sites” to hatch terror plots elsewhere.
“Just as we have seen al-Qaida metastasize subsequent to the killing of Osama bin Laden back in 2011 to Africa and North Africa and elsewhere in the Middle East, I think you will see ISIS become more active and more aggressive in a variety of places in the West, having lost the caliphate and these cities like Raqqa and Mosul,” Gates said at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank in Washington.
He said the attack of a suicide bomber in Manchester, in which 22 people were killed at a pop concert, could be a harbinger. A setback for the IS on Middle Eastern battlefields “doesn't mean they're defeated individually or that they've lost their commitment to attacking the crusaders, or whatever they want to call them. It just means they'll change their tactics,” Gates said.
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