Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that ISIS-K would love to commit a terror attack in the United States like the one in Moscow that killed at least 133 people.
Partial transcript as fallows:
KARL: Let’s start with what happened in Russia. First of all, no doubt that this was ISIS-K?
RUBIO: Yes. I mean they’ve claimed responsibility. They were warned this was going to happen. ISIS-K, ISIS-Khorasan, is largely the Afghan wing of ISIS. It’s reconstituted itself as we warned would happen when we had this disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. One of the reasons why we didn’t want to withdraw precipitously is because you gave them operating space to reorganize themselves and plan externally. And since that time they’ve attacked inside of Afghanistan.
They’re responsible for the Abby Gate, the loss of 13 Americans, and at – service people right outside the gate of the airport. They conducted an attack inside of Iran not too long ago, and now this one in Russia.
And they’ll do it here in the homeland. And we’re very – I think we should be very concerned as the FBI director confirmed to me that there is a wing – there is a trafficking network out there that specializes in moving people. They do it for profit, moving people and migrants around the world, including across our southern border who have links to ISIS.
I think common sense tells you, if they run a trafficking network of people, they would most certainly use it to move operatives into the United States. So, I’m not claiming there’s an imminent threat to the U.S., but I am saying that border situation and that existence of that network is a threat to the United States. If they could do what they did in Moscow in the United States, they would do it in a heartbeat. They want to do it.
KARL: And it’s extraordinary that they’ve taken on two of our main adversaries, Iran and Russia, and also the United States in what seemed to be pretty sophisticated, or at least deadly, effective attacks. How — how concerned are you that they are kind of in the growth industry here?
RUBIO: Well, they’re — if you think back to the end of 2020 under the Trump administration, ISIS was basically out of business. I mean, they were — they were down to less than a thousand fighters or so forth. And now, they’ve reconstituted themselves.
And part of it is, once we leave Afghanistan and we’re no longer there to conduct regular strikes, they can now operate openly. No matter how much the Taliban wants to take them on, they can’t. They don’t have the capability to do it.
And these guys have found a place to operate from. They need real estate. They need land and places where they can organize and do external plotting.
Now, it’s a lot easier for them to get into Iran. It’s a lot easier for them to get into Russia and do these things.
But their aspirations go beyond Russia and Iran. They would love to do what they did in Moscow here inside the United States. And it’s something we have to be very vigilant about when we have a border in which 9 million people have come across in the last three years.
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
