WASAHINGTON — The U.S. decision to strike the Khorasan Group to stop a possible terror attack represents a significant expansion of the largely secret war against core al-Qaeda, a group President Barack Obama has proclaimed was “a shadow of its former self.”
Administration officials said Tuesday they have been watching the Khorasan Group, an al-Qaeda cell in Syria, for years. But Obama had resisted taking military action in Syria to avoid inadvertently helping President Bashar Assad, a leader the U.S. would like to see gone. That changed, officials said, because intelligence showed that the Khorasan Group was in the final stages of plotting attacks against the U.S. and Europe, most likely an attempt to blow up an airplane in flight.
On the same night that U.S. and Arab allies carried out more than 200 airstrikes against the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq, the U.S. on its own launched more than 20 Tomahawk cruise missiles and other ordnance against eight Khorasan Group targets near Aleppo in northwestern Syria, Pentagon officials said.
It’s not clear yet whether the group’s leader, identified by U.S. officials as Muhsin al-Fadhli, was killed in the strikes. He is a Kuwaiti who spent time in Iran and has long been identified as a significant figure in al-Qaeda.
But regardless of the impact, the need for such an operation against the Khorasan Group dealt a blow to the notion, oft-repeated by Obama administration officials, that core al-Qaeda has been significantly diminished as a threat to the United States.
The Khorasan Group, after all, is made up of core al-Qaeda veterans.
The attacks add Syria to a long list of nations in which the Obama administration has taken lethal action against al-Qaeda militants, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia.
The Islamic State has broken with al-Qaeda and, for all its brutality, is not believed to be plotting attacks against the West.
In contrast, the Khorasan Group is a cell of al-Qaeda veterans of wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan who traveled to Syria to link up with the Nusra Front, the al-Qaeda affiliate there. U.S. intelligence officials say the group has been working with bomb makers from al-Qaeda’s Yemen affiliate to perfect explosives that can fool Western airport security measures, including, one official said, a bomb in a toothpaste tube.
The FBI and Homeland Security Department issued a security bulletin Tuesday that said there was no indication of advanced al-Qaeda or Islamic State group terror plotting inside the U.S., but the airstrikes in Syria may have temporarily disrupted attack planning against U.S. or Western targets.
And in an interview with Yahoo News, Attorney General Eric Holder said, “We hit them last night out of a concern that they were getting close to an execution date of some of the plans that we have seen. And the hitting that we did last night, I think, will probably continue until we are at a stage where we think we have degraded their ability to get at our allies or to the homeland.”
Because of intelligence about the collaboration among the Khorasan Group, al-Qaeda’s Yemeni bomb-makers and Western extremists, U.S. officials say, the Transportation Security Administration in July decided to ban uncharged mobile phones and laptops from flights to the U.S. that originated in Europe and the Middle East.
Holder said those enhanced security measures were “based on concerns we had about what the Khorasan Group was planning to do.”
Briefing reporters at the Pentagon on Tuesday, Lt. Gen. William Mayville, who directs operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the Khorasan Group was nearing “the execution phase of an attack either in Europe or the (U.S.) homeland.”
However, two U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss classified assessments, said there was no particular location or target that had come to the attention of U.S. intelligence agencies.
