Expert Warns Terrorists May be Setting Wildfires Across American West

Colorado’s Black Forest fire is barely contained at latest reports and has killed at least two people while consuming hundreds of homes and other structures and forcing the evacuation of more than 38,000 people, but a dozen other significant fires are also burning across the country, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

Colorado has two other active fires besides the Black Forest blaze, while New Mexico has five, California and Oregon each have two, and Idaho has one. The NIFC has counted 19,472 fires through June 14, compared with 24,198 for the same Jan. 1-June 14 period in 2012.

The NIFC’s historical data shows suggests no consistent pattern of increase or decrease of during the past decade, but wildfires can be categorized in a variety of ways and some national security experts warn that terrorists associated with al Qaeda and other radical Muslim outfits view such conflagrations as tools in their war against the U.S., Israel and Europe.

Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld of the New York-based American Center for Democracy’s Economic Warfare Institute warns that last July “al-Qaeda’s English-language online magazine, Inspire, published an article called ‘It Is of Your Freedom to Ignite a Firebomb,’ which featured instructions on how to build an incendiary bomb to light forests on fire.

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