The Threat at Home

The year since the publication of our previous annual terrorism assessment on September 18, 2019 has been marked by a number of major events, including the first deadly jihadist attack known to have been coordinated and potentially directed and carried out by a foreign terrorist organization since 9/11—the December 2019 attack in Pensacola, Florida that killed three American sailors.¹ However, the jihadist threat in the United States has remained muted overall. On the other hand, terrorism inspired by far-right ideologies and movements, and to a lesser extent ideologically framed forms of misogyny, Black separatism and nationalism, and far-left views have also posed a threat. The immense social polarization of U.S. society in 2020 as a result of the pandemic, protests over police brutality, and the coming presidential election has helped fuel this threat and creates the potential for a substantial increase in terrorist violence. Finally, the Trump administration’s intense and largely exclusive focus on Antifa misunderstands the nature of the threat at home.

For more than 18 years following the 9/11 attacks, no jihadist foreign terrorist organization directed or provided operational advice to a deadly terrorist attack in the United States. On December 6, 2019, that changed when Mohammed Saeed al-Shamrani, a member of the Saudi military stationed in the United States for training, shot and killed three sailors at Naval Air Station Pensacola.² Two months later, in February 2020, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) released a video claiming the attack and including images of a will that the video said was provided to them by al-Shamrani.³ However, the video did not provide clear evidence of AQAP’s role in the attack, leaving open the possibility that the group was exaggerating its involvement.

On May 18, 2020, however, the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released a statement that confirmed key aspects of AQAP’s claim and provided further detail on the attack’s development based on material from al-Shamrani’s phone after the FBI broke its encryption.⁴ The FBI confirmed that al-Shamrani did indeed send the will shown in the AQAP claim video, putting to bed any possibility that AQAP might have faked its connection to the plot. It also found that al-Shamrani had been radicalized by 2015 and had been plotting the attack before entering the United States in 2017. “[P]reparations for terror began years ago,” the statement reads. “He had been radicalized by 2015, and having connected and associated with AQAP operatives, joined the Royal Saudi Air Force in order to carry out a ‘special operation.’” Finally, the FBI said that al-Shamrani had “specific conversations with overseas AQAP associates about plans and tactics” for months while in the United States.

The information in the FBI statement makes clear that the Pensacola attack was the first deadly attack in the United States in which a foreign terrorist organization is known to have enabled the attack through online communication about specific operational details.⁵ It also raises the possibility that AQAP may have played a more significant role in the plot, providing direction and material aid in addition to communicating with the attacker. However, whether the plot is best understood as a case of a foreign terrorist organization virtually enabling an attack, or whether the organization actually directed and carried out the plot itself, is unclear. The answer depends on the character of al-Shamrani’s ties with AQAP before entering the United States, details of which remain unknown.

In addition to the known involvement of a foreign terrorist organization, the Pensacola attack is differentiated from other deadly attacks in the United States by another factor—it is the first post-9/11 deadly jihadist attack by a foreign national lacking permanent residency.⁶

However, it is important to note that this attack does not validate the Trump administration’s call for a travel ban or emphasis on immigration restrictions as a counterterrorism measure. Al-Shamrani was a Saudi, a country that is not on the travel ban list and whose rulers are close to the Trump administration. Al-Shamrani was also in the United States for military training, approved by the U.S. government, and did not enter as an immigrant. While numerous steps may be taken to reform or change the military training program to close vulnerabilities, according to Cato’s Alex Nowrasteh, al-Shamrani is the only individual to conduct an attack while having the kind of visa he had, warning against emphasizing a lack of border security as the key vulnerability in this case.⁷

The Pensacola attack does, however, raise a number of key questions about American counterterrorism policy and objectives. Most importantly, does the attack represent a developed capability on the part of AQAP to plot and carry out external attacks against the American homeland? Or was the attack an anomaly that shows that 100 percent security from foreign terrorist attacks over two decades is impossible?

These lingering questions emphasize the importance of public, congressional oversight and debate over American counterterrorism policy. Congress should hold hearings about the attack in Pensacola and use the hearings as an opportunity to reevaluate the United States’ overall counterterrorism approach and whether it is working almost two decades after 9/11.

In 2020, so far, there have been very few alleged jihadist terrorism crimes in the United States.⁸ According to data collected by New America, there have been seven cases of jihadist terrorism-related activity in the United States as of September 4, 2020.⁹ That would make 2020 the year with the fewest such cases in more than a decade, although there will likely be further cases as the year ends.¹⁰ In comparison, 2008 saw five cases, no year since 2008 has seen fewer than 15 cases, and 2019 saw 27 cases.

So far in 2020, there have been no deadly jihadist terrorist attacks, with the last one in Pensacola on December 6, 2019, as mentioned before. However, 2020 saw two attacks that were not deadly, other than for the alleged perpetrators.

On May 21, 2020, Adnan al-Sahli, a Syrian born U.S. citizen, crashed his vehicle into the entry barrier at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi in Texas and fired shots that injured a guard before al-Sahli was shot and killed.¹¹ Al-Sahli reportedly had a social media presence that included support for AQAP, potentially relevant given the targeting of a naval air station, as in the Pensacola attack, and the FBI treated the case as terrorism-related.¹²

The second incident occurred on May 29, 2020, when two police officers shot and killed a woman who threatened them with a knife in Temple Terrace, Florida.¹³ The woman was later identified as Heba Momtaz al-Azhari, the 21-year-old sister of Muhammed Momtaz al-Azhari, who had been arrested earlier in the week for allegedly plotting a terrorist attack in support of ISIS, and who had previously faced terrorism charges in Saudi Arabia related to the Syrian civil war.¹⁴ The state attorney for the district that includes Temple Terrace concluded that the police officers’ actions were justified and that she had been carrying out an unprovoked attack seemingly motivated by her brother’s arrest.¹⁵

These two incidents, along with other attacks and attempts since ISIS’s loss of its capital of Raqqa and later complete territorial collapse, provide a reminder that even with ISIS’s decline abroad, the jihadist terrorist threat in the United States will continue, because much of the threat has been homegrown and, while inspired by jihadist ideology, did not rely on material support from foreign terrorist groups.¹⁶

Overall, the low number of cases in 2020 so far suggests that the United States homeland remains very well protected from jihadist terrorism directed from abroad. The rise of ISIS sparked significant fears about the terrorist threat from abroad, but even while the United States initiated the counter-ISIS war, the United States did not have credible evidence of any specific ISIS-directed terrorist plots against the U.S. homeland.¹⁷ Now, five years after the initiation of that war, it is clear that ISIS managed to inspire and brand an unprecedented wave of jihadist violence in the United States and in some cases was communicating online with plotters, but there is no evidence of a strong ISIS capability to direct or carry out attacks in the United States from abroad, as many at the time feared.

That said, the deadly Pensacola attack and previous attacks that were, by luck, not lethal—including the 2009 Christmas Day bomb plot, when Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, who was trained and directed by AQAP, detonated a bomb aboard a flight over Detroit which luckily failed to properly explode; and a 2010 case in which Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American trained by the Pakistani Taliban, left a car bomb in Times Square that failed to explode—demonstrate that the threat of attacks with foreign terrorist organization involvement is unlikely to ever be fully banished, emphasizing the importance of specific investigations and general societal resilience to terrorist attacks. One hundred percent security is impossible, but the United States’ record of avoiding organizationally directed attacks on the homeland is impressive.

Nevertheless, caution is required in assessing the meaning of counts of terrorism cases, particularly before a year is over. The number of cases can reflect prosecutorial decisions rather than the threat itself, and often cases can become public later in the year or even after a year is over as they are unsealed or discovered by reporters. In the age of the novel coronavirus, there may be a second set of caveats related to the effect of the pandemic.¹⁸

An examination of the cases that have occurred in 2020 suggests that the United States’ layered defenses continue to operate well. Of the seven jihadist terrorism cases in 2020 as of September 4, four were monitored by informants. One of the cases involved an individual facing charges in Iraq for crimes alleged to have occurred there 14 years ago, with no clear allegations of more recent activity.¹⁹ There are significant questions regarding the reliability of evidence in other cases involving Iraqis facing extradition for terrorism-related charges in Iraq.²⁰ The two attacks described earlier in this section—the shooting at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi and the stabbing in Florida—constitute two of the three cases that are not known to have involved monitoring by informants. But regarding the stabbing incident by Heba Momtaz al-Azhari, an undercover FBI agent had investigated her brother, whose arrest allegedly motivated her attack.²¹ The third such case involves an individual accused of making false statements in a terrorism investigation, and little detail is available about the investigation’s methods.

While the jihadist threat to the United States has been somewhat muted compared to recent history, the United States continues to face a threat of terrorism from individuals inspired by a range of ideologies and political views, including far-right views, ideologically framed misogyny of various forms, Black nationalist, separatist, and supremacist views, and far-left views. The year 2020 has brought a period of particularly pronounced political polarization that may pose a substantial threat of increased terrorism and other forms of targeted violence.

According to New America’s tracking, the United States has seen four deadly terrorist attacks, killing six people, inspired by ideologies other than jihadism in 2020 as of September 4. The first was a far-right attack that killed two people, inspired in part by libertarian anti-government ideology, the nascent so-called Boogaloo movement, and the dynamics surrounding the current wave of protests over police brutality. On July 29, 2020 amid ongoing protests over police brutality, Steven Carrillo and Robert Alvin Justus Jr. allegedly drove a van to the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse in Oakland, California, where they shot and killed a security guard and injured another guard.²² They then drove away. Their escape led to a manhunt that discovered a van matching the description of that involved in the initial attack in Ben Lomond, California that had firearms and explosives in it. When law enforcement came to Carrillo’s residence in the same town, he opened fire on them, killing a sheriff’s deputy and injuring another deputy.

According to the Department of Justice, “Carrillo appears to have used his own blood to write various phrases on the hood of the car that he carjacked. The phrases relate to an extremist ideology that promotes inciting a violent uprising through use of militias.”²³ That referenced ideology was the Boogaloo movement as filtered through Carrillo’s particular interpretation of libertarian politics.²⁴ Carrillo also appears from his social media activity to have been influenced in his decision to carry out an anti-government attack by the heavy policing of the police brutality protests.²⁵ Carrillo reportedly met his alleged co-conspirator through a Boogaloo-associated Facebook group.²⁶

The Boogaloo movement is a new and nascent movement in which people with varying ideological reference points have coalesced around a meme that foresees a coming civil war in the United States, though those associated with the movement tend to hold to forms of right-wing, anti-government libertarianism.²⁷ The specific attack conducted by Carrillo, and the movement’s rise more generally, illustrate the ways in which a growing sense of apocalypticism can combine with the availability of firearms and online spaces to generate terrorist violence. The Carrillo attack is not a lone instance of alleged terrorist plotting emerging out of the Boogaloo movement. In Nevada, three men were charged in June 2020 with plotting to use Molotov cocktails and explosives to spark violence surrounding the protests over the death of George Floyd.²⁸

The second deadly attack in 2020 was inspired by ideologically framed forms of misogyny, specifically ideas steeped in the so-called Men’s Rights Movement. On July 19, 2020, a gunman shot and killed the son of U.S. District Judge Esther Salas and injured her husband at their home in New Jersey. The FBI identified the primary suspect as Roy Den Hollander, a self-identified "anti-feminist" lawyer was found in what is believed to have been a suicide on July 20, 2020. Hollander's website includes numerous anti-feminist writings, among them a 152-page document that included the statement, "Things begin to change when individual men start taking out those specific persons responsible for destroying their lives before committing suicide." Hollander reportedly had terminal cancer. In a long memoir, Hollander referred to Salas, before whose court he had represented a woman challenging the draft's male-only form, as "a lazy and incompetent Latina judge appointed by Obama."²⁹

The third deadly attack in 2020 was a far-right attack that occurred on August 25, 2020 during a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin against the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old from Illinois, allegedly shot and killed two people and wounded a third.³⁰ Rittenhouse had traveled from his hometown of Antioch, Illinois (about 21 miles away from Kenosha, Wisconsin) and appears to have mingled there with a largely ad-hoc militia group in Kenosha called the Kenosha Guard, which had put up a call for people to travel to Kenosha on Facebook, though importantly it is not clear that he had a relationship with the group. His social media activity reportedly shows support for Trump and police with many posts regarding Blue Lives Matter but no explicit posts tied to militia or white supremacist groups, and according to Facebook, which took down the Kenosha Guard’s Facebook page after the fact, Rittenhouse was not a member of the group’s Facebook page.³¹

In a video prior to the shooting, Rittenhouse said that he had traveled to Kenosha to protect property and was carrying his long gun for self-defense. The first shooting occurred after Rittenhouse left the car dealership he claimed to be protecting. According to a timeline in the complaint filed against Rittenhouse, Joseph Rosenbaum, one of the victims, followed Rittenhouse and appeared to throw a plastic bag at him that did not hit him.³² Rittenhouse appears to be pursued by a group including Rosenbaum. During this, an unknown individual shot into the air for unclear reasons (its muzzle flash is visible in a video of the incident) and Rittenhouse turned towards the shot and fires in that direction shooting and killing Rosenbaum. Rittenhouse proceeded to flee, and made a call to a friend whom he told “I just killed somebody.” Another video then shows Rittenhouse running as others give chase saying that he shot someone and trying to confront him. A man jumped towards him and Rittenhouse shot again and missed. At that point Anthony Huber approached with a skateboard and appeared to try and wrestle the gun away from Rittenhouse, and Rittenhouse shot Huber, who later died from the wound.

According to the complaint, Rittenhouse then sat up and pointed his gun at Gaige Grosskreutz. The complaint states, “Grosskreutz freezes and ducks and takes a step back. Grosskreutz puts his hands in the air. Grosskreutz then moves towards the defendant who aims his gun at Grosskreutz and shoots him, firing one shot. Grosskreutz was shot in the right arm. Grosskreutz appears to be holding a handgun in his right hand when he was shot.” Rittenhouse then walked towards police with his hands up though they did not arrest him at the time. On August 26, Rittenhouse was arrested and charged with first-degree homicide.³³ Further charges were filed on August 27. Wisconsin is an open carry state, but as he was younger than 18, Rittenhouse could not legally open carry. Rittenhouse’s lawyers contend that he was acting in self-defense.

The fourth deadly attack in 2020 was a far-left attack that occurred on August 29, 2020, in Portland, Oregon, when a man shot and killed Aaron J. Danielson, a supporter of the far-right group Patriot Prayer that had been involved in prior brawls in Portland and at times had brought firearms to protests.³⁴ The attack followed protests earlier in the day during which part of a caravan of Trump supporters participating in an event called “Trump 2020 Cruise Rally” drove through the city. Video appears to show Danielson at the far-right rally earlier in the day with a companion Chandler Pappas who is carrying a paintball gun. Members of the caravan shot paintball guns and mace at protesters along their drive.

The shooting occurred later that night. According to the New York Times’s analysis of two videos, two men “can be seen crossing the street, apparently to confront Mr. Danielson and Mr. Chandler.”³⁵ Someone says “Hey, we got some right here. We got a couple right here.” Pappas contends that it was the shooter who said it, and Danielson reached for and sprays his mace at which point the shooter shot and killed him.

On September 3, 2020, police attempted to arrest Michael Forest Reinoehl, a 48-year-old man, for the shooting, killing him in the attempt.³⁶ The U.S. Marshalls Task Force stated, “Initial reports indicate the suspect produced a firearm, threatening the lives of law enforcement officers. Task force members responded to the threat and struck the suspect who was pronounced dead at the scene.” Earlier in the day Reinoehl had done an interview with VICE TV, in which he appears to confess to the shooting and claimed it was in self-defense stating, “I could have sat there and watched them kill a friend of mine of color, but I wasn’t going to do that.”³⁷ However, an arrest warrant unsealed after Reinoehl’s death analyzes surveillance footage that appears to show Reinoehl following and tracking Danielson and Pappas prior to the attack.³⁸

Reinoehl was influenced by left wing politics. A Portland resident, he had gone downtown to provide “security” for protesters amid the caravan, and appears to be visible in videos clashing with the far-right protesters earlier in the day. He described himself as 100 percent anti-fascist though not a member of any Antifa group.³⁹ Reinoehl’s social media included descriptions of protests in Portland as war and references to revolution including, saying “It's escalating to a point where, you know, they're trying to disrupt us in every way, that's illegal. They're shooting at us. They're sending people that are starting fights… it's warfare, this is stuff they've done overseas for years and years and years and years; but now they're doing it to us… Every Revolution needs people that are willing and ready to fight,” and “if the police continue to pick on and beat up innocent citizens that are peacefully voicing their objections, it must be met with equal force,” adding, “we truly have an opportunity right now to fix everything… it will be a fight like no other! It will be a war and like all wars there will be casualties.”

In addition, two attackers influenced by Black supremacist and specifically anti-Semitic forms of Black Hebrew Israelite ideology as well as anti-government views shot and killed four people in an attack on a Jersey City kosher grocery store on December 10, 2019.⁴⁰ The attackers had a bomb and had reportedly scoped other potential targets as well.

These five deadly attacks in 2020 and late 2019 illustrate the range and diversity of motivations behind terrorism in America today. Some movements—notably far-right anti-government and white supremacist movements—have more developed networks and a greater history of recent violence in America. But the character of terrorist threats in America largely involves lone actors with limited organizational support for their attack and an increasingly online, remixed or syncretic, and highly individualized set of ideological and political framings. The widespread availability of firearms increases the ease of committing mass violence. Together, these characteristics should warn against viewing the threat as the province of any one movement or ideology.

Policymakers should also be cautious about overhyping the terror threat. The number of deadly attacks remains small and recent deadly attacks have involved lone actors or pairs of individuals. It would be a dangerous mistake—one with the potential to escalate the threat and harm civil liberties—to adopt heavy-handed policing methods against communities and movements as a whole based on potential scenarios of how that threat could escalate further. Instead, focusing on specific terrorist threats, violent acts, and plotting and preparation activity has greater potential to contain and de-escalate risks. However, it is also important to note how protests involving armed individuals and militias or street fighting can open space for deadly attacks that may have little preparation activity specific to the act of violence. This is visible in claims–however contested or false – of self-defense by the alleged perpetrators of the deadly attacks in Kenosha, Wisconsin and Portland, Oregon.

The number of deadly attacks does not capture the full threat of non-jihadist terrorism today, and there is reason for substantial concern about the threat picture. Systemic factors and political polarization have increased the level of threat and are likely to continue to do so. Regardless of the specifics of what would constitute an appropriate and effective policing stance, the nature of the current threat emphasizes the importance of broader societal efforts to change these systemic factors and help deflate the current heightened threat.

In assessing the threat, it is important to look beyond the deadly attacks that constitute the tip of the iceberg and consider the number of arrests, non-lethal attacks, and the broader political context in which attacks happen. Last year saw major far-right terrorist attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand and El Paso, Texas that point to the globalization of far-right movements and their tactical use of mass casualty attacks on public spaces.⁴¹

The United States in 2020 is experiencing extreme political polarization fused with often apocalyptic imagery. This stems in part from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic and the lockdowns that emerged as a response, which have fueled protests, including multiple armed protests with far-right movement participation, that call for repealing lockdown orders.⁴² Demands that people wear masks have escalated into semipolitical interpersonal violence on several occasions.⁴³ In March 2020, a man, influenced by conspiracy theories about the government response to the coronavirus, attempted to crash a train into a naval hospital ship that was docked at the Port of Los Angeles and tasked with responding to the pandemic.⁴⁴

The pandemic has had an immense economic impact on the American population, with unemployment surging to levels not seen since the Great Depression and as many as 32 percent of U.S. households are finding themselves unable to pay their rent.⁴⁵ More than 170,000 Americans have died of coronavirus—likely even more given the limitations of the count.⁴⁶ Wars are often cited as a radicalizing force; more Americans have died from the pandemic than in the Vietnam War or in World War I, and more than 50 times as many people have died as those in the 9/11 attacks.⁴⁷ Globally, more than 750,000 people have died from coronavirus since the start of the pandemic. It is not difficult to see why people might be radicalizing in this environment.

Beyond the impact of the pandemic, on May 25, George Floyd was killed while he was in the custody of Minneapolis police, touching off a renewed wave of protests over police killings, brutality, and systemic racism, some of which saw violence.⁴⁸ Three of the four deadly non-jihadist attacks in 2020 occurred in the vicinity of protests and counterprotests.

Atop both of these dynamics, the November 2020 U.S. presidential election is widely seen as a turning point for American politics that is likely to have major consequences, including potentially for American democracy itself. As two of the authors of this report argued in 2018, the terrorist threat in America is driven in large part by the extent to which these broad social phenomena shape the public discussion and people’s perceptions, because most terrorism in America is committed by lone attackers or small cells, without major organizational direction, who radicalize or organize largely online and act in an environment where widespread availability of firearms makes the jump to violence an easy step to take.⁴⁹

A large number of non-lethal attacks in 2020, as well as arrests for alleged non-jihadist terrorism-related activity often surrounding protests, points to a much larger problem of extremist violence and the potential for more deadly terrorist attacks. According to research by Ari E. Weil, the deputy research director at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats of the University of Chicago, there have been at least 66 cases in which a vehicle hit protesters in the United States since the May 25 killing of George Floyd with charges filed in at least 24 cases.⁵⁰

One case that did not result in a deadly terrorist attack illustrates the broader outlines of the threat beyond the deadly attacks this year. On March 24, 2020, a man under investigation for a domestic terrorism plot was shot and killed when the FBI tried to arrest him in Missouri.⁵¹ The man was reportedly being investigated for a plot to bomb a hospital out of anger over his city’s coronavirus lockdown order and held anti-government and white supremacist views.

In addition, according to reporting by ABC, the Missouri man had been identified to the FBI by another terrorism suspect with whom he had contact, Jarrett Smith, an active duty soldier who was arrested in September 2019.⁵² Smith was arrested after discussing a potential plot to bomb the headquarters of a major American news network with an FBI informant.⁵³ Smith had his own contact with a former soldier named Craig Lang with whom Smith discussed his plan to fight in Ukraine with the far-right Azov Battalion, a plan that he later abandoned. ⁵⁴ On April 9, 2018, according to a criminal complaint filed in August in Florida’s Middle District, Craig Lang and another former soldier, Alex Jared Zwiefelhofer, carried out an armed robbery during which they murdered the married couple whose house they robbed.⁵⁵ The robbery was allegedly part of an effort to fund travel to fight against the Venezuelan government. This plot and the networks of connections it reveals point to the potential for much greater extremist violence.

Facing the current polarized environment, the Trump administration has adopted a policy approach that misrepresents what the threat is—specifically focusing upon an organizational terrorist threat from the anti-fascist or Antifa movement. On May 31, 2020, Trump tweeted that he would designate Antifa as a terrorist organization, an action that is not possible under current laws given the lack of domestic designation authorities.⁵⁶

Trump’s focus on Antifa as an organizational threat also misrepresents what Antifa is, portraying it as both an organization and as responsible for major terrorist violence. Yet Antifa is not an organization but rather a loose network and movement.⁵⁷ Conceptualizing Antifa as a terrorist organization rather than a broad movement poses significant risks for eroding free speech, given the looseness of what Antifa means and the possibility that the term will come to mean any left wing activism, violent or not.

Moreover, Antifa is not a terrorist movement. According to New America’s data, only one person has been killed in an attack associated with the movement or its ideology in the post-9/11 era.⁵⁸ A separate tally by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (released prior to the deadly shooting in Portland, Oregon) found no murders attributable to Antifa in over 25 years.⁵⁹ This is not to say that it is impossible for individuals to commit terrorism inspired by antifascism or that the movement does not include individuals who support such acts. But there is no evidence that the movement as a whole embraces terrorism nor evidence that many individuals influenced or tied to the movement have carried out deadly terrorist violence. While the attack in Portland provides a reminder that deadly political violence can come from a wide-range of ideological perspectives including the far-left and ideas tied to the Antifa movement, inflating a single incident into a broad organizational threat is an extreme form of threat inflation.