Yet Another Hydra Head

"The Khorasan group may include individuals from Canada."
"Members of the Khorasan group represent a direct threat to Canada and Canadian interests world-wide as they could conduct attacks against civilian passenger flights or travel to Canada with the intent to carry out attacks in this country."
"The strikes [coalition air strikes in Syria] were launched to disrupt 'imminent threat' of attack upon US. interests by members of the Khorasan group. It is also unknown how badly damaged the overall structure of the Khorasan group is after the U.S. attack."
Canada Border Services Agency Intelligence Operations and Analysis Division intelligence brief

"This is old-school terrorism where there is active operational security and they are not looking for recruits among disenfranchised youth in the Paris suburbs, they just want to carry out attacks with a small cadre"
Matthew Levitt, fellow, Washington Institute

"[Khorasan is] linked to al-Qaeda [but] the hard core, almost they are a special unit, if I can put it that way. [They must be prevented from planning attacks] on our own soil."
"The so-called Islamic State, Jabhat al-Nusra and Khorasan [pose a threat to Canada]."
Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney

"The Khorasan group members actually service multiple functions inside Syria. They're both involved in the insurgency against Assad and plotting against the West."
"Those two things aren't mutually exclusive in the way they're designed."
Thomas Joscelyn, senior fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies/The Long War Journal

Gokhan Sahin/Getty Images   Heavy smoke rises following an airstrike by the US-led coalition aircraft in Kobani, Syria, during fighting between Syrian Kurds and ISIL, as seen from the outskirts of Suruc, on the Turkey-Syria border, Oct. 15, 2014.

 

Just as the Islamist terrorist group name of al-Qaeda had previously been unknown to the wide public, introduced at large by statements from then-U.S. President George W. Bush in the wake of the devastatingly fateful 9/11 attacks, the group name mention of Khorasan reached the public ear by way of current President Barack Obama introducing them as "elements of al-Qaeda known as the Khorasan group", last September.

Operating in Syria, installed by senior leadership in al-Qaeda to recruit Westerners, to train and send them back to their homelands in North America and Europe, they were meant to bring living terrorism directly to the enemy through terrorist bombing events where they might have been least expected, far from the battlefields of Syria and Iraq. The Khorasan membership is said to include Kuwaiti, Saudi and French nationals, and among them, according to federal authorities may be Canadians as well.

Al-Qaeda appears to have exploited the lapse of attention on them, with the general chaos in Syria and the focus on Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, to initiate an entry from which to launch attacks on Europe and North America, using their portals by way of their very own citizens recruited to jihad to bring the violence close to home. U.S.-led coalition airstrikes in Syria targeted and struck ISIL compounds, but Khorasan group compounds as well, along with bomb factories and training camps.

"It is also unknown how badly damaged the overall structure of the Khorasan group is after the U.S. attack", wrote the CBSA Intelligence Operations branch in its "situational awareness" report. Close to 20 Khorasan facilities over the past eight months were targeted, according to a review of statements by the U.S. Central Command. Most recently on April 7 a "tactical unit" in Aleppo was struck.

One Khorasan bomb expert is a French convert to Islam. The group was established when al-Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan dispatched veteran jihadis to Syria to "link[ed] up with" the local al-Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat-al-Nusra. Some of its members take part in the fight against the Assad regime, but the primary purpose is training camps set up in areas under al-Nusra control to "recruit, train and task Western foreign fighters", to take attacks directly to the West.

Muhsin Al-Fadhli, a 34-year-old Kuwaiti who fought with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, who learned to use explosives in Chechnya, who helped to fund the insurgency in Iraq and was instrumental in launching deadly attacks on a French ship, a U.S. Marine Corps base and Saudi Arabia, oversees this assignment for al-Qaeda. He helped to move jihadis through Turkey to join al-Qaeda in Syria while he was based in Iran.

The name Khorasan refers to the senior al-Qaeda leadership council, the Khorasan Shura.