News Analysis: U.S. changes tune on IS, frets over spreading threat

While the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama has over several months pushed a narrative that the Islamic State (IS) terror group is on the run, it is now changing its tune, expressing alarm that its influence is spreading worldwide.

Marking a major shift in the administration's take on the situation, CIA Director John Brennan expressed deep concern over the group that has overtaken vast swaths of Syria and northern Iraq. The sentiments, expressed in a speech Friday in New York, marked an even sharper departure from Obama's dismissal last year of the murderous thugs, billing them as amateurs.

Brennan said the threat had "snowballed" as an estimated 20,000 fighters from nearly 100 nations worldwide have gone to fight with the IS, many from the West, including the United States.

Left unchecked, the group would pose a threat not only to Iraq and Syria but to a wider region, as well as to the United States and its allies, the U.S. spy chief said.

The administration's sudden about-face comes amid a rising threat of Islamist terror worldwide, with radical groups across the globe viewing the IS as the rock star of the jihadi world, as the IS has been able to hold large amounts of territory in the face of ongoing U.S. bombings that have thus far failed to defeat the militants.

"There clearly is a trend on the part of the most extreme Islamic militant groups to associate themselves with the self-styled Islamic State. Some of these militant nodes, sometimes rather small, appear to have been searching for an identity of sorts and found Daesh (IS) a relatively successful and inspiring new model," Wayne White, former deputy director of the State Department's Middle East Intelligence Office, told Xinhua.

Indeed, Nigerian terror group Boko Haram earlier this month pledged allegiance to the IS in an audio recording. The group has displaced around 3 million people in Africa over the last five years, kidnapped women and girls to use as sex slaves and slaughtered whole villages at a time.

U.S. experts have expressed worry over some IS affiliates' willingness to copy the radicals' brutal methods.

"A particularly worrisome aspect of these successive affiliations ... the extent to which such groups go about emulating Daesh's barbaric behavior as in the beach execution of Egyptian Christians in Libya," White said, referring to the IS propaganda video last month that depicted the beheadings on a Libyan beach of a dozen members of Egypt's Coptic Christian minority.

The IS' trademark brutality has grabbed headlines worldwide, as the group has employed ancient and medieval methods of torture or execution, such as crucifixion, used by the ancient Romans, whereby victims' lungs eventually collapse in an agonizing death that sometimes takes several days.

The IS has allegedly killed children for the "crime" of watching soccer games on TV, as the group's draconian laws forbid most types of entertainment and leisure. It has also beheaded myriad foreign victims, including two American journalists, posting the executions on social media.

The group has shocked countries worldwide when it burned a captured Jordanian military pilot alive before posting the horrid execution online for the world to see.

But still, despite many groups' desire to jump theoretically on the IS bandwagon, some experts say it is too early to tell whether the IS will inflate the groups' courage and gravitas.

"It is too soon to tell whether the Daesh moniker will significantly enhance the gravitas of these various groups," White said.

So far the IS has not mobilized fresh jihadi groupings outside its core Syrian-Iraqi holdings, but simply caused existing extremist nodes to rebrand themselves.

So long as these outlying affiliates remain quite a distance from IS central -- and in many cases from each other -- they do not yet seem well-positioned to engage in meaningful collective support, White said.

The IS has threatened the United States and directly threatened Obama. A video posted by the IS in January shows the terror group making direct threats against the U.S. president, raising the question of whether the group can pull off an attack on U.S. soil.

Washington's worst nightmare is another 9/11-style attack, in which al-Qaida operatives struck New York and Washington and killed nearly 3,000 people in 2001. The United States wants to prevent a situation where extremists plot an attack on it from a secure base. Endi