Islamic State militants' attempts to inspire Americans to launch attacks at home pose a bigger threat to the U.S. than Al Qaeda, the head of the FBI said Wednesday.
The militant organization that is governing large swaths of Iraq and Syria "is not your parents' Al Qaeda," FBI Director James B. Comey told an audience at the Aspen Security Forum. Unlike Al Qaeda's leadership, which painstakingly vets recruits and plots attacks for months and years, Islamic State has learned to "crowdsource terrorism," he said, and it uses social media to "sell its message to troubled souls."
In particular, a feared cell of Al Qaeda leaders in Syria known as the Khorasan Group has been "diminished" by the U.