Intel chief: al-Qaida wants to attack US

The group is reportedly training a growing cadre of fighters from Europe, the Mideast and even the US

The Syrian militant group tied to al-Qaida, the al-Nusra Front, wants to attack the United States and is training a growing cadre of fighters from Europe, the Mideast and even the US, the top US intelligence official has said.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday that such al-Qaida groups in Syria have started training camps "to train people to go back to their countries", one of the newest threats emerging in the past year to US security. He said "al-Nusra Front, to name one .... Does have aspirations for attacks on the homeland." Clapper didn't elaborate or offer any evidence of al-Nusra's desire to attack the US.

Clapper described the Syrian militants as one of the newest groups to join a diverse and widely dispersed network of al-Qaida-affiliated and other extremists bent on carrying out attacks in the US. He said more established groups like Yemen's al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula are still more capable of carrying out attacks against the US, but described steep growth in numbers of fighters in Syria.

Clapper said out of an estimated 75,000 to 110,000 rebels overall battling the government of Bashar Assad in Syria, some 26,000 are extremists, and about 7,000 of them foreigners from some 50 countries, including Europe.

"Not only are fighters being drawn to Syria, but so are technologies and techniques that pose particular problems to our defences," said committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein. She warned Syria could become "a launching point or way station for terrorists seeking to attack the United States or other nations," in the annual hearing yesterday to hear the US intelligence committee's assessment of worldwide threats.

US intelligence officials have said a handful of American foreign fighters, and hundreds of European militants have already returned to their home countries. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak publicly on the topic.

The extremist fighters belong mainly to two major groups, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and Jabat al-Nusra, both allied with al-Qaida. The State Department has no estimates of how many Americans have gone to fight with Syrian rebels, but British defence consultant IHS Jane's puts it at a few dozen.

An estimated 1,200 to 1,700 Europeans are among rebel forces in Syria, according to government estimates.

US analysts fear more of those militants will tire of the battle against Assad, whose government shows no signs of collapsing, and they will take their newly acquired, battlefield-honed terrorist skills back to Europe or the US, where even a small bomb in a shopping mall can grab much greater headlines than the now-routine reports of car bombs in Syrian cities.