MOSCOW, October 1 (RIA Novosti), Anastasia Levchenko – Views among US officials and political experts on the Khorasan Group differ sharply: while the Obama administration is sending mixed messages on how strong the group's ties with al-Qaeda is, the right wing claims the term is "invented" to hide the group's direct relation to al-Qaeda and to boost Democrats' chances ahead of the 2014 mid-term elections.
KHORASAN GROUP
The Khorasan Group is a Sunni terror group that is believed to have close ties with al-Qaeda and Jabhat al-Nusra.
The Khorasan Group was led by Muhsin al-Fadhli, who allegedly solicited Iran's cooperation in al-Qaeda's 9/11 attacks against the United States. Muhsin al-Fadhli and his wife were killed by US troops during the bombardment of the Syrian city Idlib.
Bas News reported September 30 that the Khorasan group pledged support for the so-called Islamic State caliph, Abubakr al-Baghdadi.
"Khourasan leader Abu Yazid Qahir Khorasani and his companions have pledged allegiance to al-Baghdadi and they appeal to their supporters to join them with the Islamic State currently confronting the Western alliance," Bas News reported Khorasan spokesman Abu Dujana al-Afghani Khorasan as saying Tuesday.
VIEWS FROM THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION
It has been repeatedly mentioned by US officials that the Khorasan group poses a grave threat to US national security. At the same time, the Obama administration does not view it as "core" al-Qaeda, calling it rather an unknown group affiliated with al-Qaeda.
US President Barack Obama avoided using direct terms and called Khorasan Group a "seasoned al Qaeda operatives" in his statement on airstrikes in Syria of September 23.
"Last night, we also took strikes to disrupt plotting against the United States and our allies by seasoned al-Qaeda operatives in Syria who are known as the Khorasan Group. And once again, it must be clear to anyone who would plot against America and try to do Americans harm that we will not tolerate safe havens for terrorists who threaten our people," the statement published at The White House website reads.
State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki called the Khorasan Group a mere "affiliate" with "ties to core al-Qaeda," though not part of it, in her statement September 23.
"The 'Khorasan Group' is a term sometimes used to refer to a network of al-Nusrah Front and al-Qaeda core violent extremists who share a history of training operatives, facilitating fighters and money, and planning attacks against US and Western targets," the statement said.
Psaki clarified that what has been decimated is "core al-Qaeda based in Afghanistan and Pakistan." However, it "doesn't mean we're not concerned about this group, we're not concerned about offshoots and affiliates of al-Qaeda."
Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby told ABC News in September 23 that the group was "actively plotting for an attack on the US homeland."
"We had very good indications that this group, which is a very dangerous group, was plotting and planning imminent attacks against Western targets to include the U.S. homeland, and it was on that basis that we struck targets, Khorasan targets, inside Syria. ... We believe that the individuals that were plotting and planning it have been eliminated and we're going to continue to assess the effectiveness of our strikes going through today," Kirby said in the statement.
"We've been watching this group closely for some time, and we believe the Khorasan Group was nearing the execution phase of an attack either in Europe or the homeland," Los Angeles Times reported Lt. Gen. William Mayville, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as saying September 23.
"We have been focused for many years, as you know, on al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan - what we call al-Qaeda core. And that element of al-Qaeda, which is the one that hatched the 9/11 plot and executed it, has been substantially degraded and doesn't at this stage pose nearly the same type of threat that it used to. What has happened, though, over years, is that al-Qaeda has metastasized - imagine a cancer that had an original tumor. Now elements of the cells of that tumor have moved to places like the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen, parts of Africa, Somalia, and what we call the Sahel region, Mali. And now also to Syria," National Security adviser Susan Rice said September 24 on NBC's Today Show.
VIEW OF REPUBLICANS
Representatives of the right wing, however, adhere to the position that Democrats use "the Khorasan Group" term not willing to acknowledge that the group is not a separate entity, but a part of "al-Qaeda core". Moreover, Republicans believe that Obama's decision to target IS and the Khorasan Group is politicized and comes just before the 2014 midterm elections to strengthen the position of Democrats.
"I have the sinking feeling, based on six years of performance, that particularly the timing of this attack last night had more to do for the president's politics than for national security. We're six weeks away from the election; his performance on national security issues has gone into the tank. And I think this is very convenient that he's coming to the UN today," Fox News cited former Fox contributor UN John Bolton as saying September 23.
"Bush supposedly went to Iraq for oil, right? So I guess we could say that Barack Obama went to war with ISIS for the Senate. It looks exactly like that's what's going on," Rush Limbaugh, a conservative political commentator, said on his radio show September 24.
In the program broadcast on September 29, Limbaugh stated that the Khorasan Group does not exist as such. "I instinctively figured this out last Wednesday, last Tuesday or Wednesday. The Khorasan – the Khorasan, by the way, is a region that incorporates borders of Afghanistan and Syria, and I believe Iraq – but they just made it up. There is no Khorasan Group. It's al-Qaeda, and Obama didn't wipe them out. He never came close to wiping them out," he said.
Andrew McCarthy, senior fellow at National Review Institute and a commentator on legal, national security and political affairs, also shares this view: "There is a reason that no one had heard of such a group until a nanosecond ago, when the Khorasan Group suddenly went from anonymity to the ‘imminent threat’ that became the rationale for an emergency air war there was supposedly no time to ask Congress to authorize.
"You haven't heard of the Khorasan Group because there isn't one. It is a name the administration came up with, calculating that Khorasan – the Iranian-Afghan border region – had sufficient connection to jihadist lore that no one would call the president on it.
"The Khorasan Group is al-Qaeda. It is simply a faction within the global terror network's Syrian franchise, Jabhat al-Nusra. … Its leader, Mushin al-Fadhli [believed to have been killed in this week's US-led air strikes], was an intimate of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the emir of al-Qaeda who dispatched him to the jihad in Syria. Except that if you listen to administration officials long enough, you come away thinking that Zawahiri is not really al-Qaeda, either. Instead, he's something the administration is at pains to call ‘core al-Qaeda,’" National Review Online reported him as saying September 27.
The United States first conducted airstrikes against IS targets in Syria on September 23. Earlier in September, Obama announced the formation of an international coalition to fight IS militants and authorized US airstrikes against IS targets in Syria, while continuing airstrikes in Iraq, which the United States began in August.
Currently, the United States is attacking both the IS – a Sunni jihadist group that has extended its a caliphate on the territories under its control in Syria and Iraq – and the Khorasan Group in the region.
