FBI Chief: a 'Terrorist Diaspora' Is Coming

Don't expect terror attacks to end with the Islamic State's defeat in Iraq and Syria. Though that defeat is on the horizon, "through the fingers of that crush are going to come hundreds of really dangerous people and they are going to flow primarily to Western Europe" and possibly into the US, FBI chief James Comey says, per the New York Times. It will be "a terrorist diaspora out of Syria like we've never seen before," he adds, per Bloomberg. "A lot of terrorists fled out of Afghanistan in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This is 10 times that or more."

John Kerry announced last week that ISIS has been driven from almost 50% of its territory in Iraq and 20% of its territory in Syria. But "not all of the Islamic State killers are going to die on the battlefield," says Comey, speaking from the International Conference on Cyber Security in New York. Future attacks inspired or carried out by ISIS—especially lone-wolf attacks that are "increasingly hard" to stop—are "the greatest threat to the physical safety of Americans today" and will be "an order of magnitude greater than anything we've seen before." Europe has gotten a look at that reality with the attacks in Brussels and Paris, he adds. But as for the US, "that challenge is going to come." (More terrorism stories.)