Secure Line Podcast Episode 8 - Terrorism Forecast 2025

In this episode of Secure Line, hosts Leah West and Jessica Davis are joined by Dr. Colin P. Clarke, a senior research fellow at the Soufan Center and Director of Research at the Soufan Group.

They discuss the evolving global terrorism landscape and build on the previous episode's focus on Canada to broaden the scope of the conversation to examine the most pressing terrorism threats worldwide. Dr. Clarke delves into his recent analysis, Trends in Terrorism: What’s on the Horizon in 2025?, and reflects on how rapidly the threat landscape has shifted even since its publication in January. He discusses key developments, including the potential implications of the U.S. military restructuring AFRICOM, the growing influence of terrorist groups in Africa, and the concerning shifts in U.S. policy toward counterterrorism operations.

The discussion highlights the resurgence of Al-Shabaab and Islamic State-affiliated groups, particularly in Somalia, where financial networks are sustaining jihadist operations across multiple regions. The conversation also examines the significant challenges posed by Hezbollah and Hamas following a year of heavy losses, Israel’s counterinsurgency campaign in Gaza, and how Hamas’ financial networks—largely beyond Israel’s reach—remain intact in countries like Turkey and Sudan. Colin and Jessica emphasize that while kinetic strikes have weakened Hamas militarily, financial counterterrorism efforts have not kept pace, allowing the group to sustain itself. They discuss how missteps by Israel and Western governments have, paradoxically, reinforced support for groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, both in the Middle East and in Western nations.

Shifting focus to Syria, the discussion explores the collapse of the Assad regime and the emerging leadership of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). Dr. Clarke provides insight into the risks associated with this transition, the strategic withdrawal of U.S. forces, and the ongoing threat posed by Islamic State fighters held in prison camps. The conversation underscores the persistent danger of these camps becoming a breeding ground for future jihadist movements if left unchecked. The episode then turns to the controversial issue of designating drug cartels as terrorist organizations, particularly in Canada and the United States. Dr. Clarke critiques this approach, arguing that it blurs the distinction between terrorism and organized crime, potentially diluting counterterrorism efforts and introducing unintended consequences, such as expanding CSIS’s mandate into organized crime. Jessica Davis underscores the legal and practical limitations of these designations, cautioning against their long-term implications for law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

The discussion closes with an assessment of the growing threats from right-wing extremism, the resurgence of neo-Nazi and militia movements, and the potential for left-wing extremist violence in response to political developments. Dr. Clarke warns of the dangers posed by an increasingly fragmented and unpredictable extremism landscape, including groups that blend ideologies in unpredictable ways. Looking ahead, he identifies a weakened Iran as a particularly volatile factor, raising concerns about potential Iranian-backed terrorist attacks in response to its diminishing regional influence.

As always, the episode concludes on a sobering note, emphasizing the complexity of modern terrorism threats and the importance of vigilance, intelligence cooperation, and effective counterterrorism strategies. Clarke, West, and Davis leave listeners with much to consider as they navigate an increasingly uncertain security environment.

Listen to the episode below:

Read the transcript below:

Intro: Steph, Leah, Jess, is this line secure?

Leah: Welcome to another episode of Secure Line. I'm Leah West.

Jessica: And I'm Jessica Davis.

Leah: And today we are excited to be joined by Dr. Colin P. Clark, who's a Senior Research Fellow at the Soufan Center and is the Director of Research at the Soufan Group. Dr. Clark serves as part of the Research Advisory Council of the Resolve Network and is a member of the Advisory Board at the International Counter-Terrorism Review.

Clark has testified before Congress on numerous occasions as an expert witness on a range of terrorism related issues. He appears frequently in the media to discuss national security matters and has published several books on terrorism, including Terrorism - the Essential Reference Guide; Terrorism Inc. and his most recent After the Caliphate, the Islamic State and the Future Terrorist Diaspora.

Welcome Dr. Clark, Colin, nice to have you here.

Colin: Thanks so much for having me on.

Leah: This is our second episode looking at the current state of the terrorism threat. In our first episode, we looked at the threat in Canada with Stewart Bell and also broke down some of Jess's recent findings and we're excited to have you here so that we can widen the aperture and look at the threat from a global perspective.

You recently published a piece for the Foreign Policy Research Institute entitled Trends in Terrorism - What's on the Horizon in 2025? And as I understand it, this is an analytical task you for some reason undertake every year right?

Colin: *laughing* Right, yeah.

Leah: The piece went up on January 10th, in the early aftermath of the attack in New Orleans, pretty quickly after the fall of the Assad regime, and also last year, we had the crippling of Hezbollah and Hamas, and I want to get into all of that, but I have to say January 10th feels like eight lifetimes ago. Is there anything that you would have included, had you written it now and not just six weeks ago.

Colin: Yeah, A lot has happened in the past few weeks, and I think there's still a lot that's potentially on the horizon. We're seeing, I mean, there, there's news coming out from multiple directions every day about what the Trump administration is planning to do, what they might do, what they're considering.

Just yesterday there was a suggestion that AFRICOM, our combatant command overseeing the entire African continent may be folded back into European command, where it initially came from.

I think it was Courtney Kube from NBC that broke the news - kind of just did a little reminder quote, tweet, showing data, because data's always a good thing to have before you make huge decisions.

Leah: It's helpful.

Colin: Especially foreign policy decisions. Some people will make decisions based on politics, some on ideology, but I always think data is a good thing to use, you know, that's just the social scientist in me. So the Global Terrorism Index shows that half of terrorism deaths worldwide have occurred just in, not even just in Sub-Saharan Africa, just in the Central Sahel alone. So this is a huge you know, area of contention, we've got numerous groups, JNIM, various ISIS affiliates operating there, the US has withdrawn. So, you know, folding AFRICOM back into EUCOM, would seem like an odd choice. I think there's logistical hurdles there, you know, what's the lag effect between folding that back in and what happens in the meantime? And I also think it just sends a really terrible message to our African partners that they're not a priority at a time when they're facing the most dire terrorist threat that they faced.

I think right now what we're seeing across the board is a couple of areas where the US is preparing to withdraw or draw down from, and I would add to that list Syria and Somalia.

Jessica: Colin, you know, I've done a fair bit of work, on and in Africa and the terrorism problem, what do you think some of the the main issues are in that very large region in terms of terrorist groups and their capabilities and what the future there looks like in the short term?

Colin: Yeah, I think right now I'm really looking closely at the Horn of Africa for the Trump administration, which has signaled a kind of pullback or retrenchment across the globe. They've been quite active so far in the new year in Africa, there's been several high level drone strikes in Somalia. There's been several in Syria as well. My sense is, and this is just a hunch that a lot of these kinetic strikes are laying the groundwork to a withdrawal, basically saying, we've neutralized the threat, there's no reason to have troops over there, we can do everything remotely, and maybe backfill the troops with some kind of contractor or PMC, Private Military Company presence.

I don't think the Trump administration would use the term over the horizon capability strictly because that's what the Biden administration called it and they don't want to associate themselves in any way.

That's essentially what we would be relying on to manage a growing threat from Al-Shabaab. I think also the Islamic State Somalia, which I've written about. This is a crucial, as, you know, facilitative and logistical hub within the Islamic State's global enterprise. Al Karrar office is there and it's moved money, throughout the various Wilayats and I think it's critical to look at all of these different pieces. I always say the Islamic State is one of those groups where the sum of the parts is greater than the whole.

Withdrawing from parts of Somalia, we've seen with Afghanistan what even withdrawing a small number of troops can do. We really lose our eyes and ears there. Even with world-class signals intelligence capabilities we're not able to triangulate our INTs because we almost fully lose our human intelligence network on the ground. Generally we see the advantage to our many of our adversaries that are willing to fill that power vacuum. It's just kind of a continuation and this isn't a political statement, I think the Biden administration was guilty of this too - we fully don't understand great power competition in the United States because we say we’re withdrawing from Central Asia or the Sahel to focus on great power competition, but that's exactly where it's happening.

Jessica: I just want to double down on that Africa piece, particularly on Somalia and the Al Karrar office. I think what people don't understand is that Islamic State and Somalia is able to generate really significant amounts of money and have a very small footprint proportionally, which means that they're running a really large surplus. And what they're doing with that money is they're sending it to all of their different affiliates around the world, particularly to Afghanistan, but throughout the African continent as well, allowing these groups to have either developed new capabilities or when they hit financial hurdles, to sustain them to ensure that they're maintaining momentum and this is gonna be one of those things that without a sustained US presence, I think, and a sustained US interest is going to really go by the wayside because any counter-terrorism successes that have been experienced in Somalia against Islamic State Somalia or Al-Shabaab over the last 10 or 15 years have been, I would say, fairly directly attributable to US presence and pressure.

Colin: Agreed. And I think, you know, it's really a great return on investment for the Islamic State Somalia, small footprint, large surplus, and they probably did it without a Department of Government efficiency unless there's an ISIS DOGE Wilayat that I'm not aware of.

Leah: Oh, goodness. So for those who are not as deep into the global terrorism landscape, I think everybody would, it would be familiar with the concept of Al-Shabaab and ISIS existing in Africa, but who are some of the other main players in the region and where are they? What is the kind of source of their grievance or movement?

Colin: Yeah, staying on the African continent, you could look at JNIM in the Sahel, which is an Al-Qaeda linked affiliate, really kind of gobbling up larger swathes of territory, active in multiple areas in West Africa. With a reduced US presence, a reduced French presence, the US is getting pushed closer toward the West African littoral and looking at countries like Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire and others. We've seen JNIM active even in countries where there hasn't been a jihadist presence previously, like Togo and Benin.

Over on the southeast Swahili coast, you've got ISIS in Mozambique. You've got an ISIS presence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. You know, you've got an ISIS presence in South Africa. Really across the entire large continent, you've got jihadist affiliates belong to either Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State and you've also got in many of these places, weak states, fragile states, fairly draconian security services. You've got the Wagner Group or Africa Core in the mix. It's really a hornet's nest in these various parts of the world, which makes the decision to fold AFRICOM even that much more curious to me.

Now I can already see the counter argument here, which would be, well, yeah, you know, terrorism is a big problem in Africa, but it doesn't affect the United States, right? It's largely contained to the continent. Although I believe there was just an ISIS plot in Morocco that was disrupted just this week was traced back to Islamic State Sahel province. So I always say, you know, these issues are containable until they're not. That was largely the conventional wisdom about Al-Shabaab, it’s a regional problem at best, right? We've seen them attack in Uganda and elsewhere. Until we found an a Kenyan Al-Shabaab operative in the Philippines taking flight lessons with the ultimate goal of you know, conducting a 9/11 style aviation attack.

So I think, you know, just being sanguine about these things and, and resting on our laurels and saying, well, you know we expect Africa to be a conflict-ridden continent, bad things happen there, it doesn't affect us, I think is naive. And it also kind of, you know, overlooks recent history. You could have made the same argument about Afghanistan before 9/11, this is a landlocked country in Central and South Asia really doesn't have any bearing on the United States. What was the old expression: Why shoot $10 million missiles at $10 tents? We get nothing out of that and of course, you know, we all know the story of 9/11 and how that was planned from Afghanistan.

Jessica: Okay. So obviously Hezbollah, Hamas have had quite the year. I think it's fair to say they've had some pretty significant losses this year, so where do you see this going for them over the next 6 to 18 months?

Colin: Yeah, I think and I've written about this recently, I think these are both groups that are far from done. I think given the nature of Israel's military campaign across the region over the past 16 months, they've essentially sowed the seeds of a future generation. I warned about this in a Foreign Affairs piece a year ago, I think Foreign Affairs called it the Counterinsurgency Trap. I wrote the piece in response to something General Petraeus said and this is no disrespect to General Petraeus, who's probably forgotten more about counterinsurgency today than I've ever known in my life. But he was saying, you know, the Israelis need to do COIN what we call counterinsurgency in Gaza and I thought to myself, what a terrible idea. In no way did the Israelis seem postured to do, to win hearts and minds. This was, I think, a world revenge tour and it showed in the way that they went about their business in Gaza. Now, a lot of it's to be expected given the nature of the attack on October 7th, but it's also exactly what Hamas was hoping for and the Israelis walked right into that trap. They played right into their hands and they've created a new generation of Hamas supporters, not only in Gaza, in the Middle East, but in the West. I mean, just look on any college campus, I've never before seen people waving Hamas and Hezbollah flags the way I have recently, it’s really sobering.

Hezbollah is fully entrenched in Lebanese society. It's part of the social fabric of that country, a lot of that is due to Israeli missteps. An 18 year occupation of Southern Lebanon between 1982 and 2000 did a good job toward making sure Hezbollah is gonna be around to stay.

The piece about Hamas that's really interesting to me though, is we're having this conversation about the global terrorism threat landscape and we haven't even really dug into Afghanistan and the threat posed by ISIS K, which to me is toward the very top of the list in terms of that bad intersection of intent and capability.

We saw last year the Iran attack, the Moscow attack, the Taylor Swift plot and a plot against the Paris Olympics. So everybody knows ISIS K, everybody's concerned about ISIS K. But before October 7th, I couldn't find more than five people that were tracking Hamas and all five of them were probably in Israel, so there are these groups that kind of fall off the radar, these back burner groups and it just shows the power of terrorism. That you have this group that's kind of just yesterday's news that conducts this attack, that catapults it to the front page of every newspaper in the world and totally upends foreign policy for an entire region. And I think this is the tip of the iceberg. We're still in the very immediate aftermath. This attack's gonna, you know, have implications for years to come.

HTS was another group. Before the Assad regime was toppled, there was a handful of people really tracking HTS closely, Aaron Zelin, Charles Lister, Doreen Khalifa, Jerome Drevon, and, and maybe some others, but not many and now all of a sudden. Okay, what do we know about this group? What are their intentions? And so that's what's so interesting to me, just from a purely clinical perspective I find it fascinating that there's all these groups out there, and it's not always the ones you're most concerned about that end up being the ones that you end up having to focus on, which is why in my own work I try to be a bit more of a generalist, you know, instead of saying like, I'm the guy that looks at the PKK that's all I look at, and that's all I think about. I think you have to look at it across the globe, and I think you have to look at it across ideologies because you don't know which group is gonna be the most concerning really, until it happens.

Jessica: I just want to come back to this whole issue around Hamas, because what I think happened is that Israel squandered its moment in terms of how it went about prosecuting this war against Hamas because immediately after October 7th, public opinion was with Israel in a way that we probably have never seen before they really started their activities in Gaza. There was some movement from states that had not designated Hamas as a terrorist organization who actually finally got on board with doing that. But then the way things unfolded, we lost a lot of that momentum. And this is a real concern for me because Hamas finances are not in Israel. They have been, but they're not currently. What we see instead is this much more diffuse network of finance spread throughout different countries, particularly in places like Turkey and Sudan and even Algeria. All places that have not designated Hamas as a terrorist organization. So they operate with impunity. And this means, and this is some research that I've done fairly recently, one of the main ways that terrorist groups actually end and that we can bring about the end of a terrorist group is by attacking their finances. Kinetic strikes don't do it, but if you combine kinetic strikes and a whole bunch of other counter-terrorism efforts with a sustained effort against their finances, then you get things like the LTTE, which hasn't conducted a terrorist attack in how many years now, well over a decade.

And so to me, this is the future of Hamas in that because we haven't got international consensus tackling that group's finances despite the significant kinetic strikes against them, this is just gonna be a resurgent group.

Colin: A hundred percent. And I think the analogy that you used, of Israel's squandering, its political capital, if you will, it's one of the reasons that motivated me to write the Foreign Affairs piece because that's what we did. I was essentially saying, don't make the mistakes the United States did after 9/11. The world was with us up until March 2003 when we invaded Iraq. So, you know, use that moment to bring countries together to put an end to this once and for all to forge consensus, right? No one's going to sign their name saying, we support Hamas and what they just did, they just slaughtered 1200 innocent civilians. But when you turn around and then slaughter, 50,000 Palestinians, well, you've lost all that goodwill and then some. So it was really just, and again, when we talk about terrorism, this is a large part of what terrorist groups try to do, they try to get you to overreact. They’re trying to go you in right, death by a thousand paper cuts. And it's also not just about the body count, although in the case of October 7th, it was tremendous. It's the psychological impact. And that's what we're seeing now, that's something when you look at the incident in Amsterdam, going back a couple of months where you had Israeli soccer fans there getting into skirmishes and fights with individuals of Middle Eastern and North African descent in the Netherlands. This is where the conflict has come into the West on a regular basis. I keep a close enough eye on what happens in Montreal and Toronto on a regular basis, where there's a huge spike in antisemitism and related issues, to see that this is what a terrorist group wants.

Leah: You did mention Syria as well. Can you talk a little bit about your projections or assessment of the new sheriff in town, if you will, in Syria? I hesitate to call it government, but I guess that is what it is at the moment, and what you foresee there.

Colin: Yeah, I mean, Syria’s a really interesting case to me. One, I think just from a, you know, taking off my analyst hat and just from a human perspective. I'm really glad to see Bashar Assad gone. You know, this is one of the worst dictators or butchers in modern memory and so the fact that that regime collapsed, I think is generally a good thing. A former Al Qaeda in Syria leader backfilling Assad probably wouldn't have been my first choice and I know everybody's rushing to fit him and talk about how he's changed and he's no longer a jihadist. He definitely got a good McKinsey style makeover. He's saying all the right things. He's got some good talking points. His beard is nice and trimmed.

Leah: Decent tailor.

Colin: He's got better suits than I have, so there's a lot of hope there but I think there's a lot of risk as well so just think about what Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham was, a fairly brutal jihadist group operating in Idlib in parts of Northwest Syria. That doesn't translate easily into a government. If you look at some of the members of HTS, not all of these folks are gonna be generally pleased with governing. They're kind of hardcore, particularly some of the Central Asians in that group. And so that's a big concern that I have, is that some of those groups may splinter off and may set their sights on the west. They may attack Russia, they may try to attack China. They've got a long list of grievances there. But more generally, US is talking about withdrawing from Syria. There's an attempt to fold the Kurds now into a broader Syrian army, which would be really difficult to pull off. I mean, if you look at the Kurds and the threat from the Turks, that’s a major concern, obviously there.

And then we've said nothing about the camps in Northeastern Syria that still house tens of thousands of ISIS foreign fighters and their families. So it's really a powder keg in many ways. I think the camps in particular Al Hol, Roj and some others, it's really the kind of culmination of a policy of kick the can down the road that Western countries largely followed of you know I don't want to deal with this threat, I'm gonna kind of pretend it doesn't exist. But that's really, I think we talk all the time about black swan events that are difficult to predict with huge impact. This isn't a black swan. It's easy to predict what could happen there. The blueprint is what happened in Hasakah in January 2022, which is a large scale prison break and I think the Islamic State will have its eyes closely surveilling what goes on there if the SDF, the Kurds that are in charge of guarding those prisons either have conflict with the Turks across the border and that distracts them, or they're pulled away to man some other part of the country. That's a real glaring vulnerability in my mind, and it's one that you could easily see ISIS taking advantage of.

It's really difficult to be living in a world where we have threats that we couldn't anticipate, but then to have threats that we could anticipate go completely unmitigated. It’s really difficult I think.

Leah: Well now you're just preaching my language because I've been yelling about this for, I don't know, since I went there in 2019 and I could do a whole podcast where I just rant about the fact that we left our foreign fighters to be taken care of by the victims of their atrocities but we should probably move on. I do have a question though. Speaking of foreign fighters, are any of these movements actually attracting foreign fighters from the West or elsewhere? We've seen them from the Caucuses, but is this still an issue? Could it become a greater issue moving forward if we take our eye off the ball?

Colin: Yeah. So Islamic State Somalia has been attracting foreign fighters from throughout the African continent from the immediate region and even a little bit further afield, some from the Middle East. They've been volunteering as suicide bombers in the conflict there. Austin Doctors done some really good work on foreign fighters to that particular conflict. The fact that Somalia is a bit further afield than Syria, it's not as central to the narrative and the lore of global jihad. The conditions are a bit more austere right. I'm not sure how readily you can get your hands on Nutella, which I know is a big draw for many of the Europeans to go to the Caliphate. So all of these things together work in our favor, but it also shows, I remember having a conversation with somebody in the intelligence community years back, we were talking about some of Thomas Hegghammer's work on foreign fighter mobilizations, particularly his International Security piece. Why do we keep seeing larger and larger numbers of foreign fighters mobilizing and going to conflicts. Part of it really is just a byproduct of globalization. It's just a lot easier to travel to a place, to stay connected, to move money. All of these things are facilitated by globalization and technology.

I think when we talk about ISIS in particular, there's a lot of hyperbole that surrounds the group. It was this real juggernaut that caught us off guard and had kind of built this proto-state seemingly overnight. Although it wasn't overnight for those of us that have been watching this for a long time. But the two areas where I think the hyperbole wasn't an exaggeration and was legit. One was financing. Jess, you've done a lot of work on this as I have over the years. They really were a well-oiled machine. No pun unintended when it came to bringing in revenues.

But the other piece was social media and that was not an accident. I wrote a piece with Charlie Winter years ago for War on the Rocks, where we talked about the deliberate nature of them recruiting people that had a background in graphic design and publishing. The narratives were really strong, they were really compelling. They wouldn't have been out of place other than the ultimate goal on Madison Avenue because they were tailored, they were segmented. The message that went out to Uyghurs was much different than message that went out to 20-year-old kids in Molenbeek, Belgium. They knew exactly kind of what buttons to push. And I think as that becomes more sophisticated, we're gonna continue to see this foreign fighter phenomenon be a real challenge.

Jessica: I just wanna follow up on that because what the Islamic State did from the financing perspective, is really establish a blueprint that they then exported to other areas where they have either groups, provinces, or even sometimes cells.

So they have this whole blueprint where they can figure out how to raise money and manage it. And they sometimes send external advisors and we know that that's happening and continues to happen. And so I'm just wondering on the propaganda piece, Colin. Is the blueprint that they established in Syria and Iraq, the same blueprint that they're deploying now in particularly from Afghanistan, but from other parts of the world as well?

Well, the part about the blueprint is that it's somewhat malleable. It kind of gives you the basics and the rest is tailored to your individual circumstances, geography, et cetera and I think without controlling those large swaths of territory, it becomes a lot more difficult. I mean, this is something you and I talked about going back years.

There was so much focus on the Islamic State's revenue and what they were able to do and how they were able to do it. There was much less on what they spent it on, you know, which is largely internal. I mean, they were running a government, paying for schools and hospitals and so a lot of it was reinvested back into the Caliphate.

I think a lot of that money has been stashed away for a rainy day. Like some of it's at work in Turkey and different networks there through front companies and that money has kind of been moved literally around the world but I do think, and it's not just for ISIS, it’s for any other group that's paying close attention, how to replicate that, right, how to kind of go about doing the same things.

Now the oil is a bit unique, right? Like the amount of money they were making from oil, you're not gonna see that elsewhere. But the mafia style activities of extortion, taxation, kidnapping for ransom, armed robbery, all these are various elements that other groups can plug and play depending on what the circumstances are on the ground, whether they're in the Philippines, Mali, Uzbekistan, et cetera.

Leah: Speaking of criminal activity to support terrorism, let's turn our attention to using counterterrorism to fight criminal activity. We've recently seen in the US and in Canada a series of cartels designated as terrorist entities. Do you actually see that being more than just signaling. Do you see the full suite of counter-terrorism tools unlocked by a US designation being used against cartels?

Colin: You know, the honest, the honest answer is I don't know, and I don't know that the administration does either. I've gone on the record, I wrote a piece in the LA Times going back a few years ago talking about why it would be a bad idea. Let me start with this. I do think the issues the designation are intended to address are real. We have a major fentanyl problem in this country and I think cracking down on the flow of fentanyl across the borders is urgent. Now we can differ on how to go about that, there's a lot of problems with designating Mexican cartels or groups like Tren de Aragua, which is the Venezuelan kind of prison gang that's become a transnational criminal organization, or MS 13, they're motivated by profits. They're not motivated by politics. And so they're two different things. Calling them FTOs, not only is inaccurate, but it kind of blurs the lines and dilutes the foreign terrorist organization list if every criminal gang is a terrorist. Why, how is that different than saying they're a criminal gang? It just doesn't make much sense on the face of it.

Mexico, the other day, Claudia Scheinbaum, the Mexican president, came out and said three quarters of the guns used by these groups are sourced in the United States. Jess, you're probably more of an expert on this than I am, all sorts of lawsuits against US gun manufacturers and others. And I think the lawsuit piece is interesting. If the Sinaloa cartel is now a foreign terrorist organization, who's doing their street level dealing in Chicago? It's probably some 17-year-old gang member on the south side of Chicago. Should he be hit with a material support charge and thrown in jail for a long period of time for doing kind of minor hand to hand drug dealing on the streets. What happens to the whole system of processing people also at a time when we're drastically reducing the size of our government. So it just seems antithetical to me . There has been reporting by CNN, Natasha Bertrand and some others about increased CIA surveillance flights against some of these groups. But I kind of posted on X the other day, what's the plan? So, okay, we're surveilling these groups, are we gonna launch kinetic strikes? My sense is that these groups have the capability to respond in the United States if they're active, if their networks are here, their distribution networks. Does the response look like what's what we used to see in Columbia with the cartels down there, you know, with Pablo Escobar, Medellin and the Cali cartels, which is car bombs, assassinations. Do we really want some kind of urban warfare on US soil against drug trafficking networks? Will the administration take responsibility for that? Or is it just another, well, this is the fault of the Biden administration and immigrants but it's a real problem and it's a real thing to consider, poking that hornet's nest does nothing to reduce the demand for drugs in the United States. And that may be dismissed as kind of like being soft on crime or soft on drugs. But it's a real issue. Why do we have such an urgent demand in our population for these drugs.

Leah: Yeah fentanyl isn't produced in large grow op situations, there's not massive drying facilities. A good amount of the drug can be made in somebody's kitchen, so unless you're dropping many, many, many bombs in terms of actually disrupting production, it seems like a fool's errand.

Colin: Look, we've done the war on drugs. I think it's safe to say that drugs won. We like declaring war on things in the United States, and I think it actually it's not helpful. It's a way to simplify things for the population, right? This is the War on Crime, the War on Poverty, the War on Gluten. I'm actually for that one but it's the same thing with the War on Terror. It was such a misnomer. And it really made very little sense. We should have called it the War on Al-Qaeda, but we said, no, it's the War on Terror and these people attacked us because they hate our freedom. I'm like, well, why did they attack like a really free country then? Like Sweden? You know, why, why go after us?

Leah: Well in a previous episode I called it the War on Terror on Drugs. We can look at the effectiveness later. Jess you also raised some interesting points previously, and now that we've actually seen the designations, I wonder what your thoughts are after the Canadian designations at the behest of the US government and what you've seen in terms of Canada's position. What are your thoughts about that move?

Jessica: My thoughts are largely the same as they were in the last episode but I'll recap that here for Colin who probably hasn't had a chance to listen and for any of our listeners who have just joined us. Technically I think that the listings in Canada are lawful, I think that they do still stand up based on how our criteria is set out in terms of being quite loose actually in terms of establishing what a terrorist organization entity is. What it actually does though I don't think that there's much of anything. I've seen some public statements from the government and government proximate officials talking about it, unlocking all these tools, they have not been specific about what those tools are. There are differences in the United States, if you have a terrorist organization, I think that unlocks a lot of extraterritorial activities that Canada does not do. We don't conduct airstrikes against terrorist organizations abroad, drone strikes, that kind of thing, unless we're in like an active war within the particular context.

None of those things apply in the Canadian side and one of the examples that I used was that let's use MS 13. Say you have your financial institution. A lot of the listing effects are financial in nature. So you have, maybe you've got a account, somehow you've identified that this is an MS 13 affiliate or an individual who has an account at your financial institution. You're now going to report that as terrorist property and you're going to submit a suspicious transaction report. But were you not already submitting that information under anti-money laundering legislation? You absolutely were. There's no reason to think that that wouldn't have already happened. So it's really it's really symbolic and almost in a lot of ways I would describe it as diminishes the signaling power of our terrorism list because -

Colin: It waters it down.

Jessica: That's it. Like if everything is a terrorist organization, then nothing is and there's also some other funny little analytic issues that arise when you start calling everything terrorism.

In the anti-money laundering counterterrorist financing world, I've spent a lot of time pulling those two things apart. Counterterrorist financing looks nothing like anti-money laundering, and these things should not even in my mind, live together in terms of global governance, because money laundering is this huge problem, and terrorist financing is a small problem. So the terrorist financing gets subsumed into the money laundering and it is like an add-on at the end of a day's work for the Financial Action Task force, this is just exacerbating that problem. So we're now putting everything under this terrorism umbrella, which is gonna affect analytics, how things get reported, and trends and typologies, how things get detected and disrupted.

There’s a lot of second order effects that I think are not great and probably quite bad over time, and I think they ultimately make us less safe.

The last thing that I'll follow up on is something again that I mentioned. We've established a terrible precedent by listing terrorist organizations because the United States asked us to do that.

What happens when President Trump decides that Canada, that they wanna designate Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and then turns to Canada and says, you now have to do this too or by the way, we're going to kick you out of the Five Eyes. We're doing it obviously.

Leah: Yeah, the one thing that I hadn't really thought of, and I don't think anyone in the media has reported, at least in the Canadian context, and I think Jess, you're absolutely right to say that it doesn't lock on a lot of tools for the Canadians as it does in the United States when you get to now use the, you know, authorization to use military force to engage in, in certain things abroad. But in the Canadian context, technically this now puts fentanyl trafficking and these cartels under the purview of CSIS which I think would be interesting. Not like they had enough to do as it was already, but definitely not something that CSIS has typically been engaged in looking at, which is organized crime.

And the other thing in terms of actual law enforcement tools, it unlocks not very many new ones because many of the same perks you get if you're investigating terrorism, being able to get warrants for longer on easier grounds being able to get higher sentences for certain things, already exists when the indictable offense you're dealing with is done on the behalf of organized crime.

So it, it doesn't unlock a lot for law enforcement, but it does unlock CSIS for Canada writ large.

Jessica: I do also wanna say though, I've worked in both, obviously like organized crime and counter-terrorism here in Canada. And my understanding of that division of labor between CSIS and the RCMP on specifically like the serious organized crime file, was really one more of convention and resource allocation than one of specific differentiation because you can always argue that serious organized crime is a threat to the security of Canada. It doesn't easily fall under any of the parts of the act, but there was always a bit of a case to be made that it could have fallen into any of those categories. But yeah, now it definitely does, and I think the question becomes, is CSIS ready to allocate resources accordingly?

Leah: One thing we talked about was the United States squeezing us to list, for example, Antifa, but one organization we have listed in Canada is the Proud Boys, which the Trump administration just pardoned a number of them. So we've seen favorable actions by the Trump administration to members of what we deemed to be right wing extremist groups. We recently just saw in Germany the far right party take more seats than ever before. Right wing extremism remains a rising concern. Colin, I'm wondering what your thoughts are on this side of the terrorism bucket for 2025.

Jessica: And before you answer that, I also wanna add on the whole issue of Navarro in Russia, and I wanna get your take on that and Russia's role in, in fostering these kinds of networks.

Colin: Yeah, well, I think the question is timely. I just finished writing something, kind of looking at a lot of these groups. You know, what we traditionally call racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, groups like Attomwafen, The Base, all their kind of spinoffs, all of their cheerleaders and fan boys and supporters worldwide.

Leah: Sorry, I'll just note, are all designated entities in Canada

Colin: Sure. And in other countries like Australia and elsewhere. The groups that scare me the most are what we call militia violent extremists. Those are your kind of Oath Keepers, Three Percenters.

Proud Boys fall a little bit further on down the totem pole. For me, it's just still hard for me to get over how lame some of these people are. But it's just hard to take those types of people seriously. But again, I'm a big believer at taking people at the word, especially anti-government extremists, right.

But the militia violent extremists, those are the kind of strong silent type. They're not out there shit posting online. What they are doing is organizing and stockpiling weapons. That's a more long-term entrenched threat for me. That's where the next Timothy McVey is gonna come from, one of those types of organizations.

Then if you look abroad, in the United States, we don't have any far right groups listed as an FTO. We do have two listed as what we call an SDGT, Specially Designated Global Terrorist. The first is the Russian Imperial Movement or RIM and the other is the Nordic Resistance Movement. And that's more recently a group in Scandinavia. So this is very much still a thing, it's far more decentralized than a lot of the jihadist groups. A lot of it is very online. A lot of the adherents are quite young. We've seen, especially in the UK over the years, some really young neo-Nazis, you know, 14, 15, 16 years old, which makes this a generational issue, right? Even when some of these people are apprehended, arrested, punished, they're coming out of prison and they're still in their 20s and you know, sometimes they're even more radicalized on the backend than they were going in because we don't necessarily do a good job when we put people in prison of providing them with rehabilitation. It's meant to be punitive and what better place to find other white supremacists than in jail? It's like a big networking party. Right wing extremism is still a huge concern.

I'd also be remiss if I didn't flag that we're, I'm expecting to see a rise in left wing or far left violence in the United States. Whether that's from kind of anarchist types or, you know, radical environmental groups. We did a podcast in the lead up to the election. We had Brian Jenkins on. We had Julia Ebner, we had Michael Kenny and some other folks. And one of the issues that came up was you know, Michael Kenny's done a lot of interviews with far left extremists, including violent anarchists and they said if Trump is elected, they see it as existential and that they would be more willing to press the envelope than they have been in the past. And so that's something that we need to be careful of.

There's also this concept of reciprocal radicalization as the far right becomes more prominent, more active, the far left in response right. What does Antifa stand for? Anti-fascist. Well, if people perceive their government is being taken over by fascists, you're gonna have a larger anti-fascist element grow in tandem with that in response.

That's to say nothing of what we call kind of salad bar extremists, this is people that feel comfortable taking bits and pieces of different ideologies from across the spectrum. We've had cases where people are enamored by neo-Nazis and Jihadists, and they don't see any discrepancy there. And then you have these other kind of very strange groups like Order of the Nine Angles to sprinkle in a little satanism and pedophilia you know, if like the regular garden variety, extremism wasn't enough, you have these other kind of really demented twists and then I think just general kind of violent nihilism, the 764 Group that spend most of their time trying to convince people they've never met to harm or kill themselves or kill animals. Pretty grim view of humanity when we see what's going on out there and how people spend their time in the world. But you know, inevitably these all fall under the counter-terrorism umbrella in one way or another because many of these people are violent, they are extreme and some of them are looking to attack civilians, law enforcement, and military.

Leah: Throughout this episode, we've covered “Situation most likely” or the most likely threats but there's also what we call in the military “Situation most deadly”. So may not be the most likely, but could potentially on the horizon be the most deadly kind of attack or the most dangerous attack. If you had to make a prediction, Colin, do you see anything in terms of the situation most deadly.

Colin: A famous baseball player named Yogi Berra, also kind of a quasi philosopher for us here in the United States, once said, I don't like making predictions especially about the future and my addendum to that is I don't like making predictions about the future in the Middle East because you can really wind up with egg on your face.

But one thing I've been thinking a lot about is what are the implications of a severely weakened Iran? Right. We know what the implications of a very strong Iran are and now we're in a situation where, I am waiting for some kind of Israeli attack against Iran's nuclear facilities. I think that that's something we could see in the first half of 2025 before the summer, and likely with assistance from the United States, certainly with the wink, wink, if not logistical assistance to make that happen.

A weakened Iran, to me is in many ways more dangerous than a strong Iran and I think back to 1992 after Abbas al-Musawi was killed, the leader of Hezbollah at the time and Hezbollah responded, and Iran responded by attacking Israeli and Jewish targets in Argentina. Really massive attacks. Terrorism, not conventional conflict is the Iranians' comparative advantage. And so I think we could end up in a situation where we see some kind of a Khobar Tower style attack, which occurred in 1996 in Saudi Arabia against the US military facilities.

I think we could see something that we saw in East Africa in 1998 in Kenya and Tanzania. Although that was Al-Qaeda, it wasn't Iran or Hezbollah. Attacks against Israeli or American embassies, The kidnapping of Israeli or American citizens abroad. Or we could see attacks like we did in against hotels in Jakarta or Islamabad right, kind of civilian targets. That's Iran's bread and butter. They can do it and you know, that's something that concerns me over the coming year. How does a weakened Iran lash out to kind of settle the score?

Leah: Well. As our frequent listeners know, we always end in a really optimistic, heartening note. You don't come to Secure Line to feel good about the world. Colin, thank you. It was a real tour de force of the global terrorism landscape. I could not think of a better person to take us through that journey.

So thank you very, very much for being here. Thanks to Jess as always for your exceptional insights.

If you enjoyed this episode, we'll hope you give us a like, a follow and share with your friends, colleagues, mother, boss, dog walker and join us next time. Thanks.

Jessica: Thanks, Colin.

Colin: Thank you.