‘Islamic State Tries To Show It’s Winning’: US Senator

U.S. Senator Ron Johnson said that his country was “certainly vulnerable” to Islamic State terror attacks. He said that the Middle Eastern extremist organisation was trying to portray that it was “winning.”

The Republican said that the IS-inspired attack in Texas a week back was an effort to prove that the militant forces were getting victorious. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee chairman said that the United States should make sure that the organisation was proved wrong.

"The best strategy the U.S. can employ to defeat this is actually defeat ISIS in Iraq and Syria so that the reality is conveyed that this is not a winning organisation, it is a losing organisation," Johnson said. He added that it was particularly challenging to track IS sympathisers in the country.

Johnson said that people were getting recruited over social media. That is the reason it was not possible to track every suspect, he said. He said that there could be “tens of thousands” of IS sympathisers. It is “extremely difficult” for law enforcement officials to track all the suspects. According to a March figure, there may be around 90,000 Twitter accounts supporting IS forces on the social network.

Johnson compared it to searching for a needle in a “very large” haystack. However, he said that Twitter had started shutting down such accounts.

Australia was earlier threatened in April in an IS propaganda video where the militant group claimed that its next battleground would be the West. Radicalised German rapper Deso Dogg was believed to be the one to give voice to the video. The video also showed a montage of previously performed executions and threatened to perform similar attacks in Germany, France, Australia, the UK and the United States.

Defence Force chief Mark Binskin accepted that the Australian troops might face terror attacks. “Although Australian personnel will deploy in a non-combat role, Iraq remains a complex and dangerous environment and their pre-deployment training focused on replicating the challenging conditions the task group may face in Iraq,” Binskin said.

There have been other experts who claimed that IS threats on the U.S. were greater than the ones posed by al Qaeda during the 9/11 attack. They believe that IS threats were “more complicated” than al Qaeda threats.

Contact the writer: s.mukhopadhyay@ibtimes.com.au