On Friday, the families of four American Marines awoke to a world without their loved ones. They had their lives stolen from them by a gunman, 24-year-old Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez, who stormed a recruiting station and opened fire on the unarmed service personnel. American officials have advised the public not to rush to conclusions about the attacker’s motives. That’s good advice, but we shouldn’t subordinate common sense to a political ideal. Abdulazeez’s motives are not difficult to discern. Though the attacker did not share many of his thoughts online, those posts he did compose were, according to the Daily Beast, “written in a popular style of Islamic religious reasoning.” He fantasized about the afterlife and described at length how he had little regard for his meaningless corporeal form. He may have taken trips to Yemen and Jordan before executing this suicidal attack. In carrying out an assault on American soldiers, he was following an Islamic State directive. This apparent act of terrorism in Chattanooga is just one of the many efforts of ISIS-linked or ISIS-inspired attackers to execute terrorist attacks inside the United States. It is a demonstration of the terrifying fact that there will always be holes in the net and, despite the best efforts of law enforcement, the threat to the homeland cannot be entirely abrogated without neutralizing the source of terrorism overseas.
Abdulazeez is hardly the first American to try to execute attacks on soft targets in the United States, but he was among the more successful. Since the start of 2015, there have been a substantial number of terror plots that were halted in the planning stages and aspiring terrorist actors charged with conspiring to stage attacks.
In January, Ohio-based 20-year-old Christopher Lee Cornell was arrested after purchasing two Armalite M-15 model semiautomatic rifles and 600 rounds of ammunition. According to the FBI affidavit, he was allegedly planning to stage a terror attack on the U.S. Capitol Building similar to the October 2014 attack on Canadian parliament. Cornell told the undercover federal agent who helped him to plan the attack before facilitating his arrest that he wanted to execute the attack in ISIS’s name.
Just a few weeks later, three Brooklyn men were arrested after pledging to target the President of the United States in an assassination attempt and “martyr” themselves for ISIS’ cause. Investigators allege that they three men planned to travel to Turkey in order to cross the border into Syria where they would join in the jihadist fight to expand the nascent ISIS caliphate.
In mid-March, a United States National Guardsman and his cousin were arrested after allegedly plotting to use American military uniforms to infiltrate an Illinois Guards base and stage a Fort Hood-style attack on U.S. service personnel. “I wish only to serve in the army of Allah, alongside my true brothers,” wrote National Guards Solider Hasan Edmonds who was arrested while attempting to flee to Cairo.
In April, John T. Booker Jr., a 20-year-old Topeka resident, was arrested “while making final preparations for the suicide car bomb attack” on the U.S. Army Base at Fort Riley, according to the FBI.
On June 7, a New York City student was arrested after investigators learned that he had been researching designs for a pressure cooker improvised explosive device similar to those used to kill three and wound hundreds more at the Boston Marathon in 2013. When federal agents attempted to execute the arrest by pulling over a car driven by, 20-year-old Munther Omar Saleh, he and an accomplice jumped out of their vehicle and rushed the arresting agents. “Authorities said a knife was found on the man Saleh was with,” Fox News reported.
On the July Fourth holiday, FBI Director James Comey revealed that his agency had prevented a massive, ISIS-inspired terrorist event and charged 10 potential mass killers who were preparing to execute the assault. “I do believe our work disrupted efforts to kill people, likely in connection with July 4,” Comey said. He added that some of the plotting represented “very serious efforts to kill people in the United States.”
And, as recently as Monday, American officials arrested the son of the captain of the Boston Police Department for allegedly plotting to execute an ISIS-inspired terrorist attack. Radicalized by the Boston Marathon bombings, the young man who calls himself Ali Al Amriki was arrested after purchasing four weapons illegally from an informant on July 4. “In his apartment, the FBI found possible bomb-making equipment including a pressure cooker, as was used by Boston Marathon bombers Dzhokar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, as well as a variety of chemicals, an alarm clock, along with ‘attack planning papers,’” the New York Post reported.
American law enforcement deserves plaudits for effectively thwarting these and many other attacks on American targets, but that is cold comfort to those who lost friends and family members in Tennessee on Thursday. Abdulazeez’s successful attack demonstrates that, in a complex threat environment with a variety of actors trying to evade law enforcement, some will slip through the cracks.
This attack demonstrates the necessity of combating and ultimately destroying ISIS overseas in order to eliminate the ideological center of gravity that compels the young and radicalized to destroy themselves in service to a bloody belief structure. This grotesque act of violence is disturbingly common and fails to shock the senses in precisely the opposite way that Dylann Roof’s racist and terroristic attack on an African-American church stunned and traumatized the nation. Whereas acts of backwards and anachronistic racist acts of mass violence are rare, attempted attacks like those carried out by Abdulazeez’s are all too common. Someday, when the war to defeat radical Islam enjoys its final victory, acts of terrorism like those Chattanooga will be as unusual as that in Charleston. It is a day America’s lawmakers should be doing all within their power to realize.
