Derek Harvey, a former top intelligence agent and advisor in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq, has said that the Western intelligence communities have not fully grasped the threat ISIS poses to the West, failed to understand the organisation’s mode of operation, and as a result have been “playing catch up” in attempts to disrupt the threat posed by ISIS.
The CIA and other intelligence services, he says, wrongly concluded that Syria and Iraq were the main focus of ISIS, with attacks in the West being isolated events not connected with the main organisation. The coordinated attacks in Paris have laid bare the faults in this assumption.
ISIS behaves differently than its predecessor, Al Qaeda, he said. The latter focuses on large, high profile attacks, while ISIS prefers small, numerous attacks whose purpose is to cause fear, chaos, and mayhem in Western society.
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