said expect more of this. the director of the national counterterrorism center matt olson who retired last year said he expects to see more not mumbai style attacks where you have hundreds killed in several buildings but ones and twos small arms fire. in terms of the equipment these guys had, you know i went on-line and i found you can get bulletproof vests on amazon and craigslist. it s just not hard to get the tools you need to create violence. and in this particular case, nadir soofi did spend a few years ins islamabad and pakistan. but he nor elton simpson never spent time in iraq or syria getting training with isis. you don t fesly have to spend time overseas but the counterterrorism officials are seeing greater numbers, new figures i got from the director of national intelligence they re up to 22,500 estimated foreign fighters in syria, about 180 of
queens and he succumbed to those injuries. he was shot in the face. he died yesterday. flags will remain at half staff until after moore s funeral. authorities have asked charges against the shooter be upgraded to first-degree murder. thanks for watching everyone. we ll have more on the terrorist attack later throughout the throughout cnn s coverage in the day. wolf starts right now. hello, i m wolf blitzer. it s 1:00 p.m. in washington 6:00 p.m. in london 8:00 p.m. in damascus wherever you re watching around the world thanks very much for joining us. we start with an isis claim, they re claiming responsibility for the terror attack in texas. the terror group referring to their so-called soldiers as carrying out that failed attack on an event featuring cartoons of the prophet mohammed. we re also learning more details about the shooters themselves from their home in phoenix, arizona. joining us now from beirut is
communication between isis leaders in northern iraq or syria and those two gunmen in garland, texas. the statement doesn t suggest that maybe because they don t want to reveal those or because there simply isn t ahead. ahead of the attack elton simpson tweeted a request for a pledge of allegiance towards a man he referred to as the leader of the faithful the isis leader abu bakr al baghdadi but afterwards we heard from isis. it is a confusing picture and one chilling which ever way you look at it. if there was a chain of command from isis leadership to the two men that suggests attempts to target the u.s. homeland. if not talking chillingly about lone wolves inspired by the ideology on-line carrying out attacks before, in fact, their allegiance to isis has been accepted by that group. pretty troubling. wolf? there was no video of these two gunmen often as you know nick there s video that these guys going into some sort of suicide attack they prepare in
global affairs analyst and contributing writer for the daily beast. do we believe this was a specific order by isis or these two guys were inspired by isis? there s no evidence yet of a specific order but what isis could be doing right now is creating a new model. go out, carry out an attack small or large and we will claim you as our own afterwards and get all that reflected fame. i find that almost more troubling than finding that they had, you know, clear messages that they were going to carry this out. because these two guys showed up with body armor, bulletproof vests, assault rifles but one off-duty police officer managed to kill both of them an got slightly injured. it was not a successful mission on the part of isis if, in fact, this was an isis operation. why would they be bragging about it? not successful in terms of taking lives but successful in terms of getting our attention and why u.s. counterterrorism officials current and former
those in iraq and syria are thought to be american citizens at least 40 have come back the fbi is trying to track all of those, but they know they can t track down every single one. 40 doesn t seem like a huge number they could easily be monitoring 40 americans who may have received training in iraq and syria, right? 40 is not a huge number but one of the things they look for is social media, things like these tweets the more popular isis becomes through attacks like this the more you ve got this kind of social electronic footprint to comb through, to try to figure out who s real who s a threat and just expressing their constitutionally protected right to support this group. i assume the fbi is doing a postmortem on elton simpson, on their watch list convicted of terror related incident even though he only got three years probation, never served time in jail. they re looking to see what they may have messed also nadir