WASHINGTON — The U.S. envoy to a global anti-ISIS coalition told senators Wednesday that the extremist group is losing ground and influence. But lawmakers said they feared militants would push for more international terrorist attacks away from the battlefield as they get pushed back in Iraq.
Brett McGurk, the U.S. special presidential envoy to the 66-nation Global Coalition to Counter ISIL, told the Foreign Relations Committee that coalition forces are gaining territory in Iraq, and ISIS-held territory – most notably the city of Fallujah — was receding.
McGurk’s testimony came just days after Iraqi forces announced they liberated Fallujah, which was captured by the self-proclaimed Islamic State in January 2014. Last year, ISIS’ territorial holdings in Iraq shrank by about 40 percent from its maximum expansion.
But on Capitol Hill concerns about attacks in the United States are mounting. Several senators asked McGurk whether the Islamic State’s territorial losses would fuel terrorist plots in the West. ”We’ve got to be careful about that,” said Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., the committee’s ranking member. “We might be able to contain them on the ground, but then what happens to global terrorism?”
The concerns about domestic terrorism come two weeks after a gunman who pledged allegiance to ISIS opened fire on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing 49 people and wounding another 53. And while it wasn’t orchestrated by ISIS, McGurk said as the group’s holdings dwindle in the Middle East, militants will likely try to inspire similar attacks.
“What I do think they will try to do as they’re losing territory, as they’re losing their central narrative of this caliphate, this kind of state that they’re creating, they will try to inspire through the internet these lone-wolf types of attacks,” McGurk said, adding, “the risk of that is something that is very much with us, will be with us for a long time.”
Some senators criticized the Obama Administration, saying the White House has yet to produce a plan to cope with the political and ideological issues in the region that give rise to groups like ISIS.
“The thing I’m trying to break through is this distinction that exists out there between directed by ISIS — and inspired by ISIS,” said Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. “In my mind there is no distinction. They are two parts of the same strategy, which is to get people to commit terrorist acts in the name of ISIS.”
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