U.S. airports are far tougher targets for direct assaults like
Sunday's deadly Taliban attack on a crowded airline terminal in Karachi, Pakistan, but terrorists will still look for opportunities to launch similar strikes on U.S. soil, security analyst Ryan Mauro of the Clarion Project said Monday.
"The reality is that as time goes on, as the [terrorist] ideology grows and more and more people belong to that ideology, it just becomes impossible to stop everyone that's trying to carry out an attack," Mauro told Newsmax TV's Ed Berliner on "Midpoint."
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"This is a threat that's going to increase in the future," said Mauro, "because it's simply a matter of mathematics." While airports abroad present easier targets for terror networks based overseas, U.S. airports could become vulnerable to terror cells either formed domestically or imported.
Mauro cited
reports of Hezbollah's approaching Mexico's violent drug cartels about alliances, and reports that as far back as 2010, Somalis linked to al-Shabaab, an al-Qaida offshoot in Africa, were attempting to
cross into the U.S. from Mexico.
"It's much more difficult to hijack an airliner and to do things like that," said Mauro, "but how do you stop someone that just shows up to the outside of an airport with a bunch of guns and bombs and just starts shooting people?"
Mauro said those scenarios pose difficult questions for people tasked with keeping U.S. airports both secure and accessible for passengers in the post-9/11 world.
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