Nothing particularly new about this, other than that ISIS is expanding its radiological arsenal.
But take note of which country's intelligence apparatus is conspicuous by its absence:
The ISIS militant group has seized enough radioactive material from government facilities to suggest it has the capacity to build a large and devastating “dirty” bomb, according to Australian intelligence reports.
ISIS declared its ambition to develop weapons of mass destruction in the most recent edition of its propaganda magazine Dabiq, and Indian defense officials have previously warned of the possibility the militants could acquire nuclear weapons from Pakistan.
According to the Australian foreign minister, Julie Bishop, NATO has expressed deep concerns about the materials seized by ISIS from research centers and hospitals that would normally only be available to governments.
The threat of ISIS’s radioactive and biological weapons stockpile was so severe that the Australia Group, a forty-nation bloc dedicated to ending the use of chemical weapons, held a session on the subject at its summit in Perth last week.
“This is really worrying them,” Ms Bishop said in an interview with the Australian.
The Aussies....the Indians....the other twenty-seven members of NATO (or maybe not that many)....it seems like almost every Western country is alarmed and concerned about the Islamic State threat and taking it with some degree of seriousness....except the United States, which still doesn't have an ISIS strategy and quite clearly has neither the desire for nor the intention of formulating one.
Recall if you will, ladies and gentlemen, the circumstances at the time of the 9/11 attacks: al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan, a landlocked backwater....and no place else. They aspired to gain weapons of mass destruction, but did not yet have them, and were only kept from acquiring them by George W. Bush's war against them. Today, al Qaeda's successor, the Islamic State, is in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, West Africa....they are spreading logarithmically across the planet. They possess radiological and chemical and biological weapons and are working on not just acquiring nukes but deploying them as well.
The Islamic State is becoming, if it hasn't already, too big to defeat.
This is why I don't think ISIS is going to reprise the exploits of Mohammed Atta. Why bother with Islamikaze-ing a few iconic buildings and "only" slaughtering a few thousand American "infidels"? Hell, even the late Osama bin Laden said that his goal was to murder four million of us. "Caliph" al-Baghdadi sees that as a floor, not a ceiling, and is fully intent on making it a reality.
And there's no reason, as things currently stand, why he can't and won't do just that.
Put another way, Barack Obama might not have a strategy for "degrading" the Islamic State, but ISIS most definitely has a strategy for eradicating us.....
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