UPDATE
According to THIS piece by Paul Mirengoff at Powerline, Tom Joscelyn of the Weekly Standard advises that Obama’s minions did not make up the Khorasan Group, that:
Although they haven’t used Khorasan publicly to describe themselves, that name is actually taken from the Khorasan shura with Al Qaeda, which is a specific advisory council.
And the word shura, according to WikiPedia, means “consultation”.
ORIGINAL POST
Yesterday, Adam Taylor wrote a piece for the Washington Post that called into question the origin of the “Khorasan Group” moniker that the Obama administration has been throwing around lately. The O-team seems to be putting in a lot of effort to convince the American public that the enemy, at least until after the election, is not really the 35,000 members of ISIS, but a small cadre (roughly 75 members) of dedicated bombmakers situated in Syria.
Taylor’s article for the WaPo includes this interesting conclusion:
Pieter van Ostaeyen, a historian and blogger who follows jihadist movements, writes in an e-mail that “in all of the official Jihadi accounts I follow(ed), the name never was mentioned.”
<snip>
Among some analysts, there’s anger at what they see as a misleading use of the term. “[The name] is clearly U.S.-originated,” van Ostaeyen said, later adding that he believed that the United States “blew up this story” to justify its attacks on Jabhat al-Nusra. “It’s cute Pentagon is literally making up new group called ‘Khurasan’ when it’s just AQ AfPak/Iran guys in [Jabhat al-Nusra],” Zelin tweeted after the strikes against the group were announced.
That sense of distrust is amplified by conflicting reports about the threat posed by the group. While Army Lt. Gen. William C. Mayville Jr., director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, initially told reporters this week that the group was in the “final stages of plans to execute major attacks against Western targets and potentially the U.S. homeland,” exactly what that plan was remains unclear. One senior U.S. official told the New York Times this week that the plot was “aspirational.”
No matter where the name “Khorasan” came from, its easy to see why it could be a positive for U.S. officials to use it. For one thing, by avoiding using the name al-Qaeda, the U.S. doesn’t remind the world that after more than a decade of the “War on Terror,” al-Qaeda is still an operational force.
The full article is HERE.