Terror group Islamic State (IS) is now eyeing the United States, naming Washington D.C. and New York as targets it aims to hit, after it launched deadly attacks on Paris last week.
On Friday, terrorists launched multiple simultaneous attacks in several locations in Paris, killing over 120 people and wounding more than 350 others. IS, a violent terror group that has overtaken vast swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria, claimed responsibility for the attacks.
Just days after the attack -- the worst violence Paris has seen since WWII -- IS issued threats via an online video that it would attack Washington D.C., the U.S. capital, and New York, the largest U.S. city.
That begs the question of whether the United States is safe, and whether the authorities are up to the task of defending the country from a bloody terror attack on U.S. soil.
Colin P. Clarke, RAND Corporation's associate political scientist, told Xinhua that U.S. homeland security and defense is well-positioned not only to prevent such an attack, but to respond to an attack if IS were able to conduct a successful attack on American soil. Much of this has to do with local, state and federal law enforcement capabilities, as well as emergency first responders.
Still, despite the assertions of U.S. President Barack Obama that IS has been contained, the Paris attacks showed that is certainly not the case.
"Clearly IS hasn't been contained, they've proven that they have the operational and organizational capacity to conduct attacks on a global scale. Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Tunisia, Libya, and now Europe. The attackers clearly had training and were able to coordinate a sophisticated attack," Clarke said.
While the United States continues to conduct a bombing campaign against IS, critics have blasted U.S. efforts as ineffective, and as more of a public relations campaign than a serious strategy to destroy the terror group.
Critics also said the U.S. attacks on IS targets are too few and far between, falling short of bombing campaigns unleashed by previous U.S. administrations.
Wayne White, former deputy director of the U.S. State Department's Middle East Intelligence Office, told Xinhua that the foremost reason for the lack of far greater aerial success is that IS leaders and combatants have learned not to move about or gather in large groups.
Second, IS takes advantage of the many opportunities to blend in with civilian urban clutter and road traffic. And third, there is a shortage of timely, on-the-ground intelligence on the precise location of various IS-related targets, White said.
Experts also noted that there are far too few bombings against IS targets -- around 10 to 15 bombing missions per day, on average -- whereas previous U.S bombing operations saw far more ferocious attacks of 1,000 bombing sorties per day.
Moreover, reluctance to bomb oil tankers on Syrian and Iraqi roads behind IS lines, for fear that some might be civilian, has enabled IS to continue earning hefty funds from using and smuggling oil from Syrian government oil fields.
Some critics have wondered why the U.S. bombers have not destroyed the Syrian city of Raqqa, which IS has commandeered as its base. White said that utterly destroying Raqqa would surely hurt the Islamic State, but doing so would harm far more innocent civilians and their property than IS-related targets.
Carrying out such an attack risks turning many surviving civilians and those under IS rule elsewhere into embittered IS supporters and causing hundreds or thousands -- if not millions -- of other civilians to flee as refugees, White said.
The most effective short-term strategy would be to deploy many thousands of crack Western troops to take physical possession of IS holdings, but this would involve heavy casualties as IS fights back with dense concentrations of mines, booby traps, snipers and suicide bombers, he added.
