America is far better than France at disrupting terror plots like the one that left Paris awash in blood and doesn’t face the same problem of radicalized Muslims returning from the battlefield in Syria with military training, a well-placed US official told The Post.
The official, who has been briefed on the bloodshed in the City of Light, said, “One of the major issues that France is facing is their intelligence-gathering capabilities” regarding the country’s home-grown Islamic extremists.
“French intelligence is lacking considerably compared with the US when it comes to tracking these individuals, particularly as they return to France after being radicalized,” the official said. “This appears to be one of, if not the primary explanation, for what happened.”
France has a much larger number of citizens “traveling to and from Syria” than the United States does, and is therefore “much more susceptible to these attacks now,” the official added.
“Thousands of foreign fighters are being recruited from Europe, and many of them are traveling back to France after being radicalized in Syria,” the official said.
“This is a major problem not just in France, but in other European countries.”
The official noted that decoding online “chatter” by ISIS members was “becoming a real issue” for authorities because the group “is consistently encrypting their messages on social media and it’s getting harder to decipher what they’re saying.”
Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) said Sunday that there were “still no credible threats” aimed at New York or the United States, but added, “Obviously, that could change, and we have to be vigilant.”
Schumer also called for stepped-up counterterror measures.
“If ISIS is aiming abroad, outside the Middle East, what do we do? The answer is: We have tools to deal with this, particularly intelligence, reconnaissance, drones, airstrikes,” he said. “We should increase all four of those.”