Former U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) Commander Gen. Frank McKenzie said during an interview over the weekend that the threat that ISIS poses to the U.S. homeland is becoming serious because of President Joe Biden’s foreign policy.
McKenzie made the remarks during a Sunday interview on ABC News’ “This Week” with Martha Raddatz where he was asked about the recent ISIS terrorist attack in Moscow.
“General, your CENTCOM successor, General Michael Kurilla, said just days before the Moscow attack that ISIS-K, quote, ‘retains the capability and will to attack U.S. and Western interests abroad in as little as six months and with little or no warning’,” Raddatz said.
“What’s your confidence in that intelligence?” she asked.
“I think General Kurilla is spot on with that assessment,” McKenzie responded. “Here’s the problem. Again, we go back to ISIS-K. If you can keep pressure on them that they’re in their homeland and their base, it makes it hard for them to conduct these types of attacks.”
“Unfortunately, we no longer place that pressure on them, so they’re free to gain strength, they’re free to plan, they’re free to coordinate and to outreach that hit us in our homelands,” he continued. “So, you might as well be playing an away game than a home game. We’ve chosen to play a home game.”
When asked if the threat to the U.S. would be different had Biden not chaotically pulled U.S. forces out of Afghanistan, McKenzie said that if Biden had left the recommended 2,500 troops there that “things would be different.”
“Laving 2,500 troops, along with our NATO partners, who would have left 4,000 or 5,000 troops, we would have been able to continue to work against ISIS, which was the principal reason we’re in Afghanistan, to prevent attacks in our homeland,” he said. “I think we might be in a different place now. I think we might actually be safer than we are.”
“In Afghanistan, we have almost no ability to see into that country and almost no ability to strike into that country. And so, ISIS there is able to grow unabated. There’s no pressure on them,” he later added. “And, again, our operating theory has always been with violent extremists, you want local security forces to be able to control them, and then you want them to not be able to establish a connective tissue internationally that allows them to carry out external attacks abroad and it’s very hard to do that in Afghanistan where you just don’t have the ability to sense, you don’t have the ability to strike, and very limited resources.”
He said that ISIS “has a strong desire to attack” the U.S. and that “they’re going to try to do it.”
“And so, I think the threat is growing,” he continued. “It’s began to grow as soon as we left Afghanistan, took pressure off ISIS-K. So think we should expect further attempts of this nature against the United States as well as our partners and other nations abroad. I think this is inevitable.”
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