National Security

The Unguarded Homeland: Terror Surge Inside the US as FBI Bleeds Expertise During Iran War

Three attacks in seven days. A gutted counterterrorism division. Fired prosecutors mid-trial. The war in the Persian Gulf has exposed a parallel crisis no one is talking about - America is less protected at home than at any point since September 2001.

BLACKWIRE National Security Bureau

March 15, 2026 - 00:08 CET | WASHINGTON / NEW YORK / NORFOLK, VIRGINIA

Federal agencies have lost hundreds of experienced national security professionals through mass firings since January 2025. (Pexels)

Three violent incidents in seven days. An ISIS-inspired shooter killed at a Virginia university, released from prison early through a legal loophole. A Lebanese-American man rams a car packed with gasoline into one of America's largest synagogues outside Detroit. Two teenagers bring homemade bombs to a New York City protest, pledging allegiance to the Islamic State.

Any one of these events would dominate the news cycle in a normal week. This was not a normal week. The United States is three weeks into a shooting war with Iran, global oil markets are in freefall, and the domestic law enforcement apparatus responsible for stopping attacks like these has been systematically dismantled by the same administration now waging that war.

The convergence is not coincidental. It is structural. And according to veteran counterterrorism officials, it is a preview of what comes next.

Three Attacks, Seven Days

The week that broke the domestic security illusion began Thursday, March 12, in Norfolk, Virginia, when Mohamed Bailor Jalloh walked into a classroom at Old Dominion University and opened fire. He was killed by ROTC students - a retired soldier who had been convicted of providing material support to ISIS in 2016. He should have been in federal prison until 2028.

He was not. The federal Bureau of Prisons confirmed Friday that Jalloh was released 2.5 years early because of a loophole in the Residential Drug Abuse Program, known as RDAP, which allows sentence reductions for completing substance abuse treatment. Jalloh did not have a drug conviction - the law bars violent offenders from RDAP benefits. But the agency said its previous attempts to update its list of excluded offenses "had stalled in negotiations with the union representing correctional workers." (AP, March 14, 2026)

He killed one person. Two others were wounded. ROTC students tackled him and ended the attack.

The same day, in West Bloomfield Township, Michigan, Ayman Mohammad Ghazali drove a car into Temple Israel, one of the nation's largest Reform synagogues, exchanged fire with an armed security guard, then died when his vehicle engine caught fire. Authorities found large quantities of commercial-grade fireworks and several jugs of a liquid believed to be gasoline in the car. 140 children were inside the building. None were injured.

Ghazali was a Lebanese-born US citizen. A week earlier, he had learned that four members of his family had been killed in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon. The FBI is investigating the attack as a bias crime targeting the Jewish community but had not officially designated it as terrorism as of Friday. (AP, March 13, 2026)

Then, days before, two teenagers - Emir Balat, 18, and Ibrahim Kayumi, 19 - brought homemade explosive devices to a protest outside Gracie Mansion, home of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The devices did not explode. The teens were arrested. In custody, Kayumi told police that "ISIS" was his motivation. Balat said he had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and, when asked if he was aiming for a Boston Marathon-style attack, replied: "No, even bigger." (AP, March 10, 2026)

Three events. One week. The Islamic State. Iranian-conflict grief. All of it converging on a homeland whose watchmen are fewer, less experienced, and under unprecedented institutional pressure.

The FBI's counterterrorism division has lost hundreds of experienced agents through mass firings and resignations since early 2025. (Pexels)

A Hollowed-Out FBI

The timing is a catastrophe the system created for itself.

Since January 2025, the Trump administration has conducted sweeping purges of the FBI and Department of Justice, firing agents and prosecutors it deemed politically disloyal, insufficiently ideological, or connected to Biden-era investigations. The result, according to former senior officials who spoke to the Associated Press, is a counterterrorism apparatus running on reduced capacity precisely as the threat environment reaches its highest level in years.

"So much experience has been decimated from the ranks. The folks that were best positioned to get to the bottom of it before something really bad happened are in many cases no longer with the government - meaning less experienced personnel assigned to the threat are starting from way behind." - Frank Montoya, retired senior FBI official (AP, March 14, 2026)

The firing of Michael Ben'Ary is illustrative. A veteran DOJ prosecutor with over two decades of service, Ben'Ary had prosecuted the murder of a DEA agent, a suicide bomb plot targeting the US Capitol, and most recently was leading the case arising from a deadly attack on American service members in Afghanistan. He learned he was fired when his work phone was disabled while driving his child to soccer practice. An explanation came later via personal email. (AP, March 14, 2026)

He was terminated because a right-wing commentator posted online that he had previously served as a senior counsel to Biden-era Deputy AG Lisa Monaco - and alleged without evidence that he was part of an "internal resistance." Ben'Ary had never worked on any of the cases cited.

His case is not unusual. The DOJ firings have eliminated lawyers who prosecuted Jan. 6 Capitol attackers, environmental and civil rights enforcers, ethics officers, immigration judges, and counterterrorism specialists. The FBI, which declines to provide staff numbers, issued a statement saying agents "are working around the clock to defend the homeland" but did not address the scale of departures.

Former officials say the math does not work. Preventing terrorism requires institutional knowledge, informant networks built over years, pattern recognition that comes only from experience. You cannot replace two decades of counterterrorism work in six months. You cannot surge a skill set. You grow it.

Iran's Long Reach

The Michigan synagogue attack is, in isolation, a tragedy of grief and displacement. But it sits inside a larger documented pattern of Iranian-linked or Iran-inspired violence that US intelligence has been warning about since the war began on February 28, 2026.

Iran has vowed revenge for the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, carried out jointly by the US and Israel. Tehran's proxies have struck the US Embassy in Baghdad multiple times. In September 2025, a Pakistani businessman was convicted in New York of attempting to hire assassins for plots targeting public figures, including then-candidate Donald Trump, on behalf of contacts in Iran's Revolutionary Guard. (AP, March 14, 2026)

The FBI has made clear it views lone-actor violence - individuals radicalized by the war, by grief, by online propaganda - as a near-term threat distinct from coordinated state-sponsored plots. Both threat streams are active simultaneously. Both require investigative resources the agency no longer has in the same depth.

"Iran has a history of plotting attacks, targeted killings inside the US. The country has long professed its determination to carry out violence on American soil." - AP National Security Report, March 14, 2026

The Michigan attacker was not connected to Iran. But the attack follows a pattern analysts call "conflict spillover" - where ongoing military operations abroad generate domestic violence from affected diaspora communities, sympathizers, or individuals who process grief through action. The attacker's family was killed in Lebanon, where Israeli strikes have now displaced over 850,000 people. He drove two hours to a synagogue. He had been waiting in the parking lot for two hours before he moved.

That is not a spontaneous act. That is someone who had time to think, and did it anyway.

Synagogues across the US have increased private security after a wave of threats connected to the ongoing Middle East conflict. (Pexels)

The Prison Loophole That Freed an ISIS Convict

Mohamed Bailor Jalloh's story is its own scandal, independent of everything happening around it.

In 2016, Jalloh was caught in a three-month FBI sting. He confessed to wanting to attack a US military base "similar to Fort Hood." He tried to donate $500 to ISIS - the money went to an FBI-controlled account. He then attempted to purchase an AR-15 from an undercover agent. He pleaded guilty to providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization and received an 11-year sentence. (AP, March 14, 2026)

Under federal law, violent offenders are ineligible for the RDAP substance abuse sentence-reduction program. Jalloh was a violent offender. He did not have a drug charge. He should have been ineligible.

He was released anyway, 2.5 years early, on December 23, 2024. The Bureau of Prisons confirmed this happened because the agency's attempts to update its list of excluded offenses had "stalled in negotiations with the union representing correctional workers." The agency said it has since closed the loophole.

He was on federal supervised release - probation - when he walked into that classroom. His probation officer had last visited his home in November. He was not flagged. He was not monitored in any meaningful way. He obtained a firearm through a third party - federal charges were filed Friday against the person who supplied the weapon.

The Bureau of Prisons said that since canceling the union contract last year, "not one inmate with terrorism-related charges has received time credit" for completing RDAP. That change came after Jalloh was already out. It came after someone died.

The NYC Bomb Plot: ISIS in Plain Sight

If the ODU shooting reveals systemic failure in corrections and the Michigan attack reveals the human cost of the Middle East war, the Gracie Mansion bomb plot reveals something more basic: the threat is not going away, and it is recruiting teenagers.

Emir Balat is 18. He is a Philadelphia-area high school senior who has not attended in-person classes since September 2025. Ibrahim Kayumi is 19. They apparently did not know each other before they appeared at a far-right protest outside New York City's mayoral residence carrying homemade explosive devices.

When Kayumi was arrested, he immediately named ISIS. Balat told investigators he had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. When asked whether he was trying to replicate the Boston Marathon bombing, he said he was aiming for something bigger. (AP, March 10, 2026)

The devices did not detonate. Multiple searches were conducted, including of a Pennsylvania storage unit connected to the investigation. Both are being held without bail on charges including attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization and attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction.

They were not on any watch list. Neither had a criminal history. One was a high school student who had switched to virtual learning. The other was a 19-year-old with no apparent prior contact with law enforcement. Two independent actors, unknown to each other, converging on the same target on the same day, both pledging to the same group.

This is precisely the scenario counterterrorism analysts fear most: spontaneous, distributed, low-cost attacks by individuals who radicalize through digital channels, require no coordination, and leave no detectable operational trail until the moment of action. Preventing this requires a robust informant infrastructure, active monitoring of extremist online spaces, and analysts with deep pattern recognition experience. All of which the FBI has fewer of today than it did 18 months ago.

The Compound Risk: War + Weakened Watchmen

The United States has fought multiple wars since 2001 without a major domestic terrorist attack on the scale of September 11. That track record is the product of enormous investment: a massively expanded FBI counterterrorism division, fusion centers in every state, the entire intelligence community realigned toward the domestic threat, and thousands of individual cases - prosecutions, disruptions, informant operations - that never made headlines because they succeeded before anyone was hurt.

That apparatus was not built in a day. It was built case by case, informant by informant, analyst by analyst, over two decades. Much of that accumulated human capital is now gone.

The FBI declined to provide staffing numbers. It issued a statement: "Agents and staff are dedicated professionals working around the clock to defend the homeland and crush violent crime. The FBI continuously assesses and realigns our resources to ensure the safety of the American people."

That statement does not address the question of whether there are enough of them. Former officials do address it.

"The folks that were best positioned to get to the bottom of it before something really bad happened are in many cases no longer with the government." - Frank Montoya, retired senior FBI official (AP, March 14, 2026)

The concern is not that the remaining agents are incompetent. It is that expertise is not transferable on short notice. An analyst who spent five years mapping an extremist network in the upper Midwest cannot be replaced by a new hire in six months. A prosecutor who has tried twelve terrorism cases cannot be cloned from a job posting. The knowledge walks out the door.

And when it walks out - when the informant network is thinner, when the pattern recognition is less experienced, when the legal team handling the prosecution has less depth - the cases that used to be caught early start arriving at the investigation stage at a different point. Sometimes a point past which the attack has already happened.

US military assets are heavily committed to the Persian Gulf conflict, while domestic security resources face unprecedented strain. (Pexels)

What Intelligence Officials Are Watching

There are two distinct threat streams running in parallel, according to former officials and published reporting.

The first is state-sponsored Iranian activity: organized plots, proxy attacks, assassination operations against public figures or military personnel inside the United States. Iran has run these operations before - including the disrupted 2022 plot to kill former National Security Adviser John Bolton, and the 2025 conviction of a Pakistani businessman for arranging assassination plots on behalf of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. (AP)

The war has given Iran new motivation. Supreme Leader Khamenei is dead, killed by the US-Israeli air campaign. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has repeatedly warned of consequences. Iran's parliamentary speaker has warned that attacks on its oil infrastructure would trigger "a new level of retaliation." These are not idle threats. Iran has a documented history of acting on them years after the provocation.

The second stream is harder to interdict: conflict-inspired lone-actor violence from diaspora communities, sympathizers, or individuals who have followed the war's civilian death toll and decide to act. The Michigan synagogue attack belongs here. Lebanon has suffered over 800 dead and 850,000 displaced since Israel escalated its operations against Hezbollah. Those are not statistics to Lebanese-Americans. Those are family members.

The FBI investigates hate crimes and terrorism differently. An attack on a synagogue motivated by grief over Lebanese civilian casualties may or may not meet the legal threshold for terrorism. The investigation is ongoing. But its operational effect - terror, disruption, children hiding under furniture while a car crashes through the front wall - is identical.

Neither threat stream requires the coordination that the pre-September 11 model was designed to detect. Neither leaves much operational trail. Both are harder to stop than a structured cell conducting surveillance, communicating through trackable channels, and needing weeks of preparation. The hardest attacks to prevent are the ones closest to impulse.

The System Is Under Maximum Pressure at Minimum Capacity

The combination is historically unusual. The United States has fought major overseas wars without a simultaneous degradation of its domestic security institutions. It has also experienced domestic terrorism surges - the post-September 11 wave, the period following the rise of ISIS in 2014 - but always with a fully staffed, well-funded FBI leading the response.

It has not, since 2001, faced this combination: an active war producing documented retaliatory threats from the enemy state, three domestic attacks in a single week, and a counterterrorism division operating at reduced staffing from mass firings.

The White House acknowledged on Saturday that the US faces "elevated terrorism threats" against the backdrop of the Iran war and cuts at the FBI and Justice Department. It did not detail specific threats or specific responses. The State Department again urged US citizens in Iraq to leave "now."

Temple Israel had prepared. It hired a former police lieutenant as full-time security chief. Its staff had completed active shooter training earlier this year. Its armed security guards stopped the attack. 140 children went home.

Old Dominion University had ROTC students who subdued the shooter. The New York City bomb plot devices failed to detonate.

These were near-misses. Professional security, military training, and mechanical failure are not a counterterrorism strategy. They are luck and prior investment. You cannot rely on them indefinitely.

The question the AP investigation raises - and that no official has answered on the record - is simple: how many near-misses does a depleted FBI prevent that we never hear about? And how many of those are no longer being prevented?

The Strait of Hormuz is the most visible chokepoint in this conflict. But there is another chokepoint, less visible, running through every FBI field office in the country - staffed by fewer experienced people than at any point in the last two decades, carrying the highest threat level since then.

Three weeks into the Iran war. Three attacks in seven days. The scorecard, so far, is: defenders 3, attackers 0. No mass casualties. The question is whether that holds, and whether the institutions responsible for holding it still have the depth to keep the streak going.

Sources: Associated Press (March 8-14, 2026) - reports by Larry Neumeister, Eric Tucker, Michael Kunzelman, Zeke Miller, Michael Biesecker, and AP national security correspondents. FBI public statements. Bureau of Prisons confirmation. AP audio reports. All quotations verified from sourced articles.