16 Years After 9/11: The State of the Terrorist Threat
16 Years After 9/11: The State of the Terrorist Threat by Peter Bergen, CNN News
Sixteen years after the 9/11 attacks, there is a fair amount of good news about the state of the battle against jihadist terrorists: The United States has not suffered a successful attack by a foreign terrorist organization since al Qaeda's horrific attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
Al Qaeda's core group, based in Afghanistan and Pakistan, hasn't launched a successful attack in the West since the suicide bombings on London's transportation system more than a decade ago in 2005, which killed 52 commuters.
The terrorist group that sprang up in the wake of the setbacks suffered by al Qaeda, ISIS is itself now largely defeated, having lost the city of Mosul, its headquarters in Iraq, and much of the city of Raqqa, its headquarters in Syria.
The US-led coalition has also killed an estimated 60,000 to 70,000 ISIS fighters, according to US Special Operations Command's Gen. Raymond "Tony" Thomas, speaking at the Aspen Security Forum in July.
A month later Brett McGurk, the US envoy to the anti-ISIS coalition, said ISIS had lost control of more than three-quarters of the territory that it had once held in Iraq and more than half of what it had once controlled in Syria.
The threat posed by American "foreign fighters" returning to the United States who were trained by ISIS or other jihadist groups in Iraq and Syria is quite low compared to European countries. According to public records, only seven American militants have returned from the Syrian and Iraqi battlefields and none has carried out an act of terrorism.
That's the good news, but there are other troubling trends. Since 2014 there have been six lethal jihadist terrorist attacks in the United States, killing 74 people, according to New America's research…