The "threat is growing" that the Islamic State group will attack the United States and other foreign powers, retired Gen. Frank McKenzie, the former head of U.S. Central Command, warned Sunday.
"ISIS-K in particular, but ISIS in general, has a strong desire to attack our homeland," McKenzie told ABC News' "This Week" co-anchor Martha Raddatz. "We should believe them when they say that. They're going to try to do it, and I think the threat is growing. It has begun to grow as soon as we left Afghanistan and took pressure off ISIS-K."
ISIS-K, based in Afghanistan, took responsibility for deadly shootings in a Moscow music hall earlier this month and claimed to have carried out a mass bombing in Iran in January.
"I think we should expect further attempts of this nature against the United States as well as our partners and other nations abroad," McKenzie said. "I think this is inevitable."
The retired general is the author of the upcoming book "The Melting Point," which details leadership and his time in command of U.S. forces in the Middle East, including the exit from Afghanistan.
McKenzie said Sunday that the United States does maintain enough troops in the Middle East to counter extremists in Iraq and Syria, but he thinks a small military presence should have remained in Afghanistan as well.
"In Afghanistan, we have almost no ability to see into that country and almost no ability to strike into that country," he said, disputing President Joe Biden's claims that the United States would have the ability to act quickly in Afghanistan, even from far away.
The absence of troops, he said, is helping ISIS-K and other militants gain strength.
"If you can keep pressure on them in their homeland, in their base, it makes it hard for them to conduct these types of attacks," McKenzie said. "Unfortunately, we no longer place that pressure on them. So they're free to gain strength. They're free to plan.
"They're free to coordinate and to outreach and hit us in our homeland. So you would much rather be playing an away game than a home game. We chose to play a home game."
Meanwhile, the March 22 attack in Moscow shows how the militants have been able to regroup and plan large operations, said McKenzie.
But when large attacks are planned, they are often detectable, as in the case in Russia.
The United States said it alerted the Kremlin to the danger of a terror attack, and McKenzie said tragedy and deaths could have been averted if the Russians had heeded the warnings.
"Those attacks are generally not going to be well-coordinated; they're not going to be well-planned and they're not going to be well-supported, but they could be very lethal because they'll be so hard to detect," said McKenzie.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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