The head of the FBI said in an interview broadcast late Sunday that the U.S. is preparing for an imminent terrorist attack.
{mosads}FBI Director James Comey said the Khorasan Group, an al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, could still be working on a plan to hit the United States.
“Khorasan was working and may still be working on an effort to attack the United States or our allies, and looking to do it very, very soon,” he said on CBS’s “60 Minutes.”
“I can’t sit here and tell you whether their plan is tomorrow or three weeks or three months from now,” he said.
“Given our visibility, we know they’re serious people, bent on destruction. And so we have to act as if it’s coming tomorrow.”
He said that terrorist networks in Syria are a product of “the metastasis of al Qaeda” with the two major groups, al Nusra and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
“They are both vicious, sort of the inheritors of a lot of the mantle of al Qaeda and present different threats in a lot of ways,” Comey said.
He described the al Nusra group as experienced bomb-makers, killers and planners seeking international targets.
“These are people who have thought about bringing terrorism on a global scale,” he said.
“ISIL is as sophisticated, maybe more than any of the others in its media presence and its recruiting and training efforts online,” he said, using another acronym for ISIS.