Former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency Michael Morell says attacks in Paris, the Sinai Peninsula and California carried out in ISIS’s name are just the “tip of the iceberg.”
{mosads}“While those three attacks have our attention, it’s the tip of the iceberg in terms of what they’re doing across Africa and in the Middle East,” Morell said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
Morell said the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria was building off a string of successes with the recent attacks, killing 250 people in just over a month.
“In the last five weeks, to put it in baseball terms, they’ve hit for the cycle,” he said. “They have a major attack that they conceived and directed in Rocca, that’s Paris; they’ve had an attack that one of their affiliates has done, that’s the Russian airliner in the Sinai; and they’ve had an inspired attack here in the homeland, that’s San Bernardino.”
“ISIS is on a roll here,” he added.
Morell said the U.S. has to have a “home game, playing defense” and an “away game, taking the fight to them on offense in Iraq and Syria.”
Fourteen people were killed and 21 injured in San Bernardino, Calif., on Wednesday, when a married couple allegedly stormed the Inland Regional Center, which provides social services to those with developmental disabilities.
Authorities said one of the suspected assailants pledged her support to ISIS during the attack.