Report: Khorasan Has Trained Australian Nationals

Australian officials are worried that the Khorasan group, an Al Qaeda organization which has itself to attacking the West, has been training Aussie jihadis in the arts of bomb making and other terror tactics.

The report worries that there are somewhere between five and ten Australian nationals who have been training with the specialized Al Qaeda group, The Australian reported.

Khorasan is believed to be led by senior AL Qaeda operative Muhsin al-Fadhli, who reports suggest may or may not be dead. Fadhli, as a former leader of Al Qaeda in Iran, may have played a key role in soliciting Tehran’s cooperation to attack America on September 11, 2001.

Some have questioned whether the Khorasan group is a fake name given by the Obama administration to distinguish the jihadi outfit from “core” Al Qaeda, while others have been skeptical about the administration’s claim that Khorasan had indeed been an “imminent threat” to the United States.

Terrorism expert Andrew McCarthy wrote in National Review last week:

“There is a reason that no one had heard of such a group until a nanosecond ago, when the “Khorosan Group” suddenly went from anonymity to the “imminent threat” that became the rationale for an emergency air war there was supposedly no time to ask Congress to authorize.

You haven’t heard of the Khorosan Group because there isn’t one. It is a name the administration came up with, calculating that Khorosan — the Iranian-Afghan border region — had sufficient connection to jihadist lore that no one would call the president on it.”