Top U.S. officials this week suggested that the infamous and lethal terrorist network known as Al-Qaida could re-form within Afghanistan in the next one to two years, The New York Times reports.
“The current assessment probably conservatively is one to two years for Al-Qaida to build some capability to at least threaten the homeland,” Lt. Gen. Scott D. Berrier, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said Tuesday at the annual Intelligence and National Security Summit.
“We’re thinking about ways to gain access back into Afghanistan with all kinds of sources,” the general continued. “We are prioritizing that effort. We’ll continue to prioritize it. But we have to be careful to balance these very scarce resources with this pivot to China, and to Russia.”
However, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said at the conference that “we don’t prioritize — at the top of the list – Afghanistan,” adding, “What we’re looking at is Yemen and Somalia, Syria and Iraq.
“That’s where we see the greatest threat.”
“We are already beginning to see some of the indications of some potential movement of al-Qaida to Afghanistan,” David Cohen, the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said at the conference, according to The Wall Street Journal. “But it’s early days and we will obviously keep a very close eye on that.”
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{Matzav.com}
