Return to Transcripts main page

At This Hour

Air Strikes Disrupt Khorasan Threat to U.S. Homeland; What Air Strikes Mean for Obama; U.S., Arab Nations at War with Terrorists; Syrians Flood Turkey to Escape ISIS

Aired September 23, 2014 - 11:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: All right, Jim Sciutto is back with us right now. Jim is at the United Nations where there is a whole lot going on this week, including President Obama set to speak over the course of the week.

Jim, what struck you about this new information about Khorasan, this al Qaeda offshoot, that the administration says is or was a threat to the homeland?

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: John, I think this is the most remarkable development of the last several hours here that after all the talk about ISIS in recent days and weeks that we were surprised this morning to learn that a significant part of these air strikes targeting this group Khorasan and that this attack was, in the words of the Pentagon press secretary there, Admiral John Kirby, that it was in the final stages of a major attack on Western targets including possibly the U.S. homeland.

But also that point you highlighted that they were trying to recruit Westerners. Remember, you and I have talked about this multiple times about the concern that ISIS that has done a great job of recruiting Western fighters to the fight inside Syria. The concern was what happens when they go home. Have they been trained and encouraged to carry out attacks? Now you have this other group, Khorasan, al Qaeda- tied group, Khorasan taking advantage of the chaos in Syria to establish a safe haven and to plan attacks. So this is not something that may happen down the line if the U.S. does not address there threat now. It's the U.S. belief that they had plots under way in the final stages and that they were recruiting Westerners possibly to take part in the plots. This is a real surprise and it shows that Syria is not just about ISIS. It's about more than one terror group. And that gets at, John and Michaela, just how serious this is.

BERMAN: Really two separate series of air strikes here, Jim.

I want to check in with Evan Perez who's been working his sources with in homeland security, also law enforcement in the United States.

How do they describe this threat from Khorasan, this al Qaeda offshoot? And when they say "imminent," U.S. officials, just how imminent?

EVAN PEREZ, CNN JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: John, one of the things they were trying to figure out is how they could figure out when these -- when these plots could be put into -- put under way. One of the things that they were worried about was, you know, the preparation of these plots, of these attacks, have reached a stage where, you know, once it went operational, they wouldn't know how to detect it. So that was one of the big concerns here as you heard in that press conference. They said that it was nearing an execution phase. We're told they had acquired materials, there were indications that they were moving from beyond just planning these things, which is -- you know, these are explosives that are hard to detect by our normal screening methods and they're hidden inside common things like your phone or your laptop or in toiletries that are very common to bring on airplanes -- John?

BERMAN: What we do not know, because the Pentagon briefers, General Bill Mayville and Admiral John Kirby, they said they do not know yet you how successful the strikes were against Khorasan, this al Qaeda offshoot. They don't know how much they destroyed or degraded their capabilities to attack the United States.

Thank you so much, Evan.

I want to check in with Barbara Starr at that briefing.

Not only, Barbara, do we get that information against the strikes, which were mostly tomahawk cruise missiles against Khorasan, but we got a lot more information and detail about the resources used by the United States and its allies in these overall attacks carried out against Khorasan and ISIS overnight in Syria.

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: An awful lot of information, John. And it's especially interesting that the U.S. used tomahawk missiles against the Khorasan group. These, of course, are unmanned cruise missiles, very precise, fired from long distances. They were going deep into Western Syria. There are Syrian air defenses there, there's a lot they don't know about what opposition forces may have in that region. So going with unmanned cruise missiles, very precise, very heavy-duty missiles, you get your target destroyed but you don't risk a U.S. pilot. That certainly had to be a consideration. You saw the manned aircraft much more in central Syria and off to the east near the Iraqi border.

They are assessing what they did accomplish against Khorasan. They may well have a very good idea of what they got there, but they're not ready to reveal it yet. Clearly, they thought that the group was in the final stages of being ready to execute an attack and they didn't exactly know what the target may be. But the fact that they used the tomahawk missiles, that mean this planning was not last minute. You have to program those missiles. You have to know what you're going after. They are guided by GPS, by satellite, to their target. So you have a lot of programming of the target into the missile. They didn't just cook this up last night at midnight. They knew very well what they were going to go after for some period of time. That target list was very well developed and, boy, it was kept secret.

BERMAN: Indeed. They said they had been watching Khorasan, this al Qaeda offshoot, for some time now. They clearly had those targets ready to go and the weaponry ready to go.

We'll talk more about that. We'll also talk about these three waves of air strikes, how the United States and its allies went about it, and get some sense of the strategy behind the operation. We'll speak more with our experts just ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ADM. JOHN KIRBY, PENTAGON SPOKESMAN: -- in the fight against ISIL, which, in these strikes, included Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia with Qatar in a supporting role, continue to be a critical part of our strategy. Secretary Hagel appreciates their partnership, and in particular, the hard work and strong leadership shown by our Central Command commander, General Lloyd Austin, who gave the secretary an update on the operation throughout. We did not coordinate with the Assad regime.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: That was Admiral John Kirby talking about the first U.S.-led air strikes on Syria, really groups inside Syria, both ISIS and an al Qaeda offshoot known as the Khorasan group.

I'm joined by our analysts. We have military analyst, Lieutenant Colonel Rick Francona; also terrorism expert, Paul Cruickshank; homeland security expert, Juliette Kayyem.

Rick, Colonel, I'd like to start with you here because we got the first time line of these attacks. Three waves starting at 8:30 p.m. eastern time last night, starting with tomahawk cruise missiles, ending after midnight, including air strikes, the tomahawks, F-15s, F- 16s, F-18s, B-1s, drones. When you heard that list, why? What was that the strategy? And you saw the videos and pictures of things that were hit. Why the emphasis on precision weapons?

LT. COL. RICK FRANCONA (Ret.), CNN MILITARY ANALYST: A lot of these targets in Raqqa were in the city, and if you're going to be striking targets in a city, a populated area of half a million people, you want to make sure you're hitting exactly where you need to be to minimize civilian casualties.

The reason we're able to do this without boots on the ground, without spotters there, without somebody designating the targets, these were fixed targets. These were facilities. They weren't moving. They were buildings, for the most part, warehouses, that sort of thing. So that worked.

Barbara's point about the choice of the missiles for the targets west of Aleppo very well taken because they had to penetrate Syrian air defenses. Although the Syrians knew something was up, you still have to worry about them trying to react or somebody reacting, so those targets taken by the tomahawks.

The other targets taken by manned aviation and the drones and, as you said, the full range of U.S. weaponry there. But reading that list, it tells me that there's a lot more land-based aviation that we thought was -- than we thought was there. This is not just a carrier.

(CROSSTALK)

FRANCONA: This is a lot of resources available. And a lot of resources can carry a lot of weaponry. So this is -- this was well done and well planned.

Also, the fact that the coalition forces were involved in both air portions of this, the second and third waves, shows me that there was a lot of planning to do this because you've got a lot of moving parts up there, a lot of different airplanes, a lot of different countries. So this was well-planned, well done.

BERMAN: It needs to be said, a lot of plans we didn't knowing about, because I think a lot of people were surprised how quickly these attacks inside Syria came. There had been some sense that it might be weeks or months.

FRANCONA: And we were surprised by the number of coalition countries involved.

BERMAN: And I think we were more surprised that the attacks were not just against ISIS but a separate set of strikes against this al Qaeda offshoot known as the Khorasan group.

I want to bring in Juliette Kayyem, our homeland security expert.

Juliette, these were strikes carried out by tomahawk missiles. They had to put in the coordinates to these missiles and somehow they had to know the coordinates of what they were shooting at. What does that tell you?

JULIETTE KAYYEM, CNN HOMELAND SECURITY ANALYST: That tells me that all these people who were clamoring for something to get done this last month should sort of lick their wounds. This was remarkable to get five Sunni Arab nations to commit to this kind of air attack. It tells me, on the intelligence side, that we or some of our allies clearly have assets on the ground that are hearing what is going on, because the notion that there was an imminent threat but we didn't know what it was suggests it's not just signal intelligence but that we have human assets or our allies have human assets or our allies have human assets that have infiltrated these al Qaeda splinter groups, which is good news in the sense of disrupting them.

It was interesting, in the briefing -- the other take away I took was they said U.S. interests or Western interests, and then the language was, "and potentially the U.S. homeland." So it may have been that they were just unclear about whether this was U.S. carriers, Western carriers that were coming to the U.S., if it was airline attacks or if actually there was a homeland threat where some part of the sprinter group is already here.

Remember the fight going on out there is a fight for relevancy by these terrorist organizations that are at war with each other, so al Qaeda, Khorasan, and ISIS. They want to be relevant. And they show relevancy by attacking us. That's the only way that they can do it, and that's why going after them was so necessary at this stage.

BERMAN: Officials seem particularly concerned about their ability with explosives, IEDs, improvised explosive devices, and the fact that they were including Westerners for potential attacks on Western targets.

I want to bring in Paul Cruickshank, our terrorism analyst.

And I think so many of us want to know so much more about Khorasan. I've heard it described as an al Qaeda all-star team. The leader is this man, Mousid al Fadli (ph), 33-year-old Kuwaiti. This is a guy who knew and worked for and with Osama bin Laden, and may have very well had knowledge of the 9/11 attacks before they happened?

PAUL CRUICKSHANK, CNN TERRORISM ANALYST: That's right. He's a veteran Kuwaiti al Qaeda operative, very, very capable. And it's believed he entered into Syria from Iran about a year ago and built up this group in Idlib Province west of Aleppo. They've been trying to recruit Westerners in their ranks, trying to training to give them in bomb making, truing to give them explosive devices so they can go back to the West, back potentially to the United States to carry out attacks. This is a group closely linked to al Qaeda central. The leader is somebody, as you said, who had advanced knowledge of the 9/11 attacks.

BERMAN: That puts him in very rare company. And that put this group -- some have said it's as dangerous to the United States, to the homeland, perhaps even more so, than ISIS.

CRUICKSHANK: In the immediate time, I think that's the analysis that they're the more immediate threat. But I think there could also be a big threat now coming from ISIS itself, now that ISIS is under attack from the United States in Syria. That was a red line perhaps with its group and they could put their very significant resources into also launching attacks back against the West. And we've seen their spokesman on Sunday night calling for lone-wolf strikes in Europe, so a lot of concern that the terror threat level will go up in the days ahead.

BERMAN: All right. Paul Cruickshank, Rick Francona, Juliette Kayyem, thanks so much.

Stick around. Ahead for us @THISHOUR, the Pentagon says U.S.-led air strikes in Syria disrupted this imminent terror threat to the homeland. The question is, how successful was it and what does it mean for President Obama as a world leader and a political leader here in the United States? That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Meanwhile, we will move forward with our plans, supported by bipartisan majorities in Congress, to ramp up our efforts to train and equip the Syrian opposition for the best counter weight to ISIL and the Assad regime. And more broadly, over 40 nations have offered to help in this comprehensive effort to confront this terrorist threat.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: The United States is at war this morning, leading a coalition that includes five Arab nations, part of the operation set to wipe out ISIS inside Syria, limit their capability to attack inside Iraq, to degrade and disrupt the activities of that terror group. Again, five Arab nations participating, involved at some level in these air strikes.

There are a lot of people, as we sit here this morning, surprised by the size of this coalition and the fact that it came together so quickly.

We're joined now by political commentator, Sally Kohn. And also Republican strategist, Mercedes Schlapp, joins me from Washington.

Mercedes, it's interesting. CNN was speaking with John Negroponte, a diplomat. He was the ambassador to just about everything. Mostly for Republican administrations. Ambassador Negroponte said he believes that what has gone on over the last 24 hours shows that there is a fairly comprehensive strategy to battle ISIS. Now, hasn't that been the debate? A lot of people have been critical of the Obama administration for having no strategy. Now you have this very, very senior Republican diplomat saying there is a comprehensive strategy here being displayed by this administration.

MERCEDES SCHLAPP, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: Well, it looks like these air strikes obviously have been planned for several weeks. I think that there's obviously -- with the president coming out today with a very somber statement saying, look, we have bipartisan support and I want to make sure that with these congressional leaders -- And I think the rollout was a little rocky when he started off by saying he had no strategy, to then having a half-baked strategy whether we're going to put troops on the ground or keep the troops out. And so I think this is going to be basically -- obviously what we know, a very long-term military campaign where pretty much we, Republicans and Democrats, need to come together and support our commander-in-chief.

BERMAN: Indeed, Pentagon officials say it is only the beginning.

Sally Kohn, I want to bring you in now because you come from part of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party that has not been in favor of really any kind of military action here in Syria, certainly not the likes of which we have seen today. Based on what you have seen over the last 24 hours and President Obama's explanation of it and the news overnight, there was also an attack on this terror group that was plotting an imminent threat against the United States, what's your reaction?

SALLY KOHN, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: You're right. I don't think military strikes are the right solution. I've been very clear about that. In that context, as we step back from what I and others think, it's important to look at what the president has done differently. So I don't think a cautious and thoughtful strategy, whether I agree with it or not, I don't think a cautious strategy is no strategy. It's right to approach this carefully.

Also what the president has done -- and this is a real victory for him and a real victory for American foreign policy, is he hasn't gone it alone. Part of the danger in bombing ISIS is it becomes the U.S. versus ISIS, us versus them, and incites all the hatred and anger that fuels terrorism against America. By bringing in Arab partners, by working on diplomacy, we help to maybe ensure that isn't the case. That is a significant victory and a big departure from the past.

BERMAN: Mercedes, do you give the administration credit, including Secretary of State John Kerry, for putting together this coalition, five Arab nations, at least three of which dropped bombs inside a Sunni Arab nation?

SCHLAPP: Absolutely. I think that building the international coalition is incredibly important. President Bush did it back with the Iraq war. Actually, both President Bushes did it. It's incredibly important. The terrorism and ISIS and al Qaeda and Khorasan, their target is Western civilization. So, again, I think it's incredibly important to have the international cooperation. And, again, the bipartisan support of Congress.

BERMAN: All right, Mercedes Schlapp, Sally Kohn, thank you both so much.

Ahead for us @THISHOUR, we'll talk about some of the tens of thousands of people caught in the middle of this conflict right now. The victims of ISIS, tens of thousands fleeing Syria, taking their lives on their backs, trying to get over the border, and it's snowballing as we speak. More on that next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BERMAN: As the United States and its Arab allies attack ISIS inside Syria, tens of thousands of Syrian civilians are flooding across the border with Turkey. Families, children trying to escape the perils of ISIS.

Our Arwa Damon is at a refugee camp along the Turkish/Syrian border.

ARWA DAMON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: At least 158,000 mostly Syrian Kurdish refugees have crossed from Syria into Turkey over the last few days, this just one of those border crossings that saw hundreds, if not thousands of people coming through, exhausted, dejected, covered in a layer of dust. Many of them thirsty and hungry. Especially difficult and grueling conditions for the children and the elderly. Many of whom waited on the other side of the border overnight before Turkish authorities finally allowed them through. A lot of the adults themselves breaking down as they spoke not only of the ordeal that they went through but of the homes and the lives that they left behind.

The U.S. air strikes at this stage are being, by and large, welcomed by a number of Syrian opposition activists that we have been speaking to. One of them inside the city of Raqqa saying, if I could dance, I would but I'm too afraid to do so. And that is because, he says, ISIS has long cleared out of its main headquarters and various buildings that the U.S. and its coalition allies were striking in Raqqa quite some time ago. And in anticipation of these air strikes, they were increasing their presence inside the streets. But also, he was saying inside people's homes.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights at this stage reporting at least 70 militants killed, some 300 wounded. Some of those wounded being ferried across the border into Iraq.

When it comes to the results of these U.S. and coalition air strikes and how ISIS is going to react to that, we're just going to have to wait and see. There's only one thing that is certain, and that is that ISIS is not an organization that is going to evaporate or be defeated easily.

Arwa Damon, CNN, at the Syria/Turkey border crossing.

BERMAN: Millions of lives disrupted in Syria over the last few years.

That's it for us.

"LEGAL VIEW" with Ashleigh Banfield starts right now.