WASHINGTON: The US intelligence chief warned on Thursday that a group of fighters trained in Afghanistan and Pakistan was emerging as another major security threat.

Director US National Intelligence James Clapper said that the network, known as the Khorasan Group, was so strong that it rivalled the threat posed by the Islamic State, Fox News reported.

This is the first time that the United States has acknowledged the existence of such a group, which it said was raised and trained in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal zone.

Mr Clapper confirmed that the group was already operating in both Iraq and Syria and also posed a serious threat to US national security. “There is potentially yet another threat to the homeland, yes,” he told an intelligence conference in Washington.

US intelligence officials, who spoke to various media outlets, said the Khorasan Group included veteran Al Qaeda fighters of the Afghan war who were now trying to recruit western extremists to attack Europe and the United States.

Mr Clapper said the group included operatives trained by notorious bomb maker Ibrahim al-Asiri, who could be used to carry out attacks inside the United States and other Western states.

He said the Islamic State group also had “very sophisticated recruiters and motivators” but he worried more about the presence of such elements inside the West.

“And so we continue to worry, I think, more than any other single threat is the home-grown version which are very hard to detect. And so I think what’s happened in Australia is a manifestation of that threat,” he said.

Published in Dawn, September 19th, 2014