Continuing to Low-ball Jihadis in Syria Will Come Back to Bite Us

The mainstream media and the Obama Administration continue to minimize the extent of jihadi influence in Syria, even while ostensibly reporting on the threat possessed by battle-hardened foreign fighters returning from the civil war there.

In his column, “A nightmare group in Syria could target the U.S.”, David Ignatius cites U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, where Clapper caps the number of extremists operating in Syria at “26,000.”

The Administration has held steady at 26,000 “extremists” (an ill-defined largely meaningless term), even as Syria-watchers have put the number of self-described jihadists and those seeking to establish an Islamic state, or implement shariah, much higher.  As far back as September of last year, reports indicated that “nearly half” of the Syrian opposition are “Islamist” in disposition.

And there are some who would whittle down the 26,000 “extremists”  even lower if they could get away with it.  In January, in the Council on Foreign Relation’s online magazine Foreign Affairs, in an article subtitled, “An Al Qaeda-linked Group Worth Befriending” Michael Doran, William McCants, and Clint Watts made the case for working with Ahr Al-Sham, an Islamist militia at the time led by the now deceased Al Qaeda member Khalid Al-Suri. Ahr Al-Sham is a dominant part of the Islamic Front faction and routinely fights alongside the Al Nusra Front. The Islamic Front was cited as a partner worth working with by the head of the Syrian Emergency Task Force Mouaz Moustafa. Links have been reported between the SETF and the Global Muslim Brotherhood. Because of the reportedly close links between SETF and the State Department, it’s not surprising that the U.S. did in fact attempt to reach out to the Islamic Front, only to be rebuffed.

This tendency to define jihadists and ties to terrorism downward will come back to bite us.

Combine the Obama Administration decision to loosened rules to permit those who have engaged in “limited material support” for terrorism into the country, with revelations by Sen. Chuck Grassley of a DHS “Hands off” list for those with known terrorism ties, and the ever present tendency to define threats down to the lowest possible common denominator, and we have a recipe for disaster.

However the Syrian civil war ends, it is not  hard to imagine that we may see lining up on our borders asylum seekers confidently informing Immigration agents, “Oh, no, I’m not an extremist. I provided limited material support for the AL-Qaeda-linked group that even the State Department wanted to befriend.”