Foreign fighters who had returned home from Iraq and Syria carried out less 20% of the 51 terrorist attacks against the West over the past three years, a regional expert told Senate members Thursday.
Lorenzo Vidino, director of the Program of Extremism at George Washington University, said the vast majority of assaults on the United States and Europe were conducted by individuals who had little-to-no affiliation with the Islamic State—a trend that is likely to escalate as the jihadist group continues to lose ground.
"Let me highlight here a phenomenon that I think we're going to see much more frequently in the future, which is that of virtual planners or virtual entrepreneurs," Vidino testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "These are people who live in ISIS-controlled territory and use social media and encryption to connect with jihadist sympathizers worldwide, guide them through the planning and execution of attacks."
This technique was evident in the May 2015 attack on a community center in Garland, Texas, where two gunmen opened fire during a cartoon contest featuring the Prophet Mohammed. The FBI said the men had been in communication with ISIS via encrypted text messages prior to the assault.
"It's likely that the caliphate will disappear, but ISIS will endure and evolve," Vidino said. "The so-called virtual caliphate—ISIS's presence online—ensures its future."
Over the past three years, a mere eight percent of the 51 attacks against the West were carried out by individuals who acted on the direct orders from ISIS. Another 26 percent were conducted by individuals who were inspired by the group's ideology, but had no connections to its militants.
A majority of those attacks—66 percent—were carried out by individuals who had some type of connection to ISIS, but acted independently.
Top U.S. officials have warned lawmakers of this trend for months.
Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told senators in May that the American-led offensive to retake ISIS's de facto capital of Raqqa in Syria would ultimately fail to inhibit the terrorist group's ability to perpetuate attacks against western targets because of its pervasive ideology. He said ISIS may lose a centralized, territorial safe haven to direct attacks, but predicted it would still be able to propagate terror abroad.
Daniel Byman, a senior fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, raised similar concerns before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday.
"Their ideology still has appeal to some people and that enables them to make geographic leaps where it would be hard for them to do just with their people," Byman testified.