WASHINGTON – “He acknowledged the truth, he gives [allegiance], the order has been given, his heart beats, he accepts, butterflies kick in. The target is given, the anticipation is over, a sense of relief.”
With this stream-of-consciousness narrative, an Islamic State fighter using the name of Abu Abdullah Britani posted this call May 10 on Twitter to would-be jihadists in the West. Don’t second-guess yourself, he cautioned, in messages translated by the SITE Intelligence Group. “Thoughts going through your head, how many will be killed, how will they react, but you snap out. “
This is the menacing but murky face of the “lone wolf” attackers that U.S. counterterrorism officials see as an emerging threat for the American homeland. They’re disparate, confused, Internet-savvy, eager for self-promotion and hard to find. Their very anonymity is frightening, to the point that one Middle East expert worried aloud last week, after the still puzzling Chattanooga murders by Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, that America was “one attack away” from a national furor about the lone-wolf threat.
Terror, of course, is precisely what these Internet recruiters want to generate. But U.S. officials caution that the best response is calm, steady work by police and intelligence agencies and a resilient public. “It’s a problem we’ll have for the foreseeable future,” says one official who deals closely with the problem. “The U.S. is much better off than other parts of the world, but we have a lower threshold [of pain].”
After the Chattanooga attack, the administration from the top down warned that the problem doesn’t have quick or easy fixes. Officials admit that the best measures are the simplest – communities watching for signs that may predict violent behavior, and a public that doesn’t panic when attacks come.