Aftandilian in The Arab Weekly on the ISIS Threat
Gregory Aftandilian, Lecturer at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, published a recent Op-Ed on the continued threat from ISIS and recent comments on the subject from FBI Director Christopher Wray.
Aftandilian’s Op-Ed, entitled “Baghdadi Video Shows Evolving Threat From ISIS’s ‘Virtual Caliphate’,” was published in The Arab Weekly on May 5, 2019.
From the text of the article:
The recent video appearance of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his praise of the large-scale terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka highlight the continued threat the Islamic State poses to countries around the world, including the United States.
The video aimed to underscore that, despite the loss of its territory and so-called caliphate in Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State (ISIS) will be a force to reckon with in the coming years, especially because it seems to inspire extremists around the globe. While there is not enough evidence to say ISIS planned or directed the deadly Easter attacks in Sri Lanka, the terrorists in that plot may have been inspired by ISIS propaganda.
Soon after those attacks, FBI Director Christopher Wray, speaking April 26 at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, warned of the evolving threat from ISIS’s “virtual caliphate.” The “threat isn’t gone,” he emphasised and countries around the world should not be complacent about it. Online radicalisation, he added, is becoming a “bigger and bigger problem” and so the “threat is real.”
This is not the first such warning from Wray. Last October, he told a congressional committee that ISIS has “proven dangerously competent in employing digital communication” and that such terrorists can “spot, assess, recruit and radicalise vulnerable persons” in the United States to travel abroad or “conduct an attack on the homeland.”
Aftandilian spent over 21 years in government service, most recently on Capitol Hill where he was foreign policy adviser to Congressman Chris Van Hollen (2007-2008), professional staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and foreign policy adviser to Senator Paul Sarbanes (2000-2004), and foreign policy fellow to the late Senator Edward Kennedy (1999).