Rescue expert warns FlyDubai hijacking attempt shows US, allies are ‘playing checkers’ against terror threat
The FlyDubai attempted hijacking shows the U.S. and its allies are still using outdated counterterrorism assumptions against increasingly sophisticated enemies, a U.S. rescue expert and 9/11 first responder warns.
"They’re good at chess," Bryan Stern, chairman and CEO of Grey Bull Rescue, told Fox News Digital on Monday, saying the radical ideology behind the FlyDubai attack is a ringing "bell" for global aviation security and Western counterterrorism strategy.
"And we’re, if we’re lucky, playing checkers – if we’re lucky – and I would argue we’re not even playing checkers that well."
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Stern, whose global nonprofit conducts evacuations from war zones and hostage situations, said the thwarted FlyDubai attack by "an angry, radicalized, Sunni bad guy" is showing just how far behind our enemies we are in this post-9/11 world.
"They understand us significantly more than we understand them," Stern, who has been "hunting the bad guys" for 30 years, said. Stern said the U.S. has to understand the "asymmetric warfare" as well as the increasingly sophisticated enemy does.
"The reason why a football coach watches game tapes is not to watch his own team play, it's to watch the bad guys play," he said. "We gotta start watching some game tapes."
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Stern is intimately in tune with the playbook on the ground in war zones, including the Middle East and Iran.
"We conduct these operations in these places still to this very day," he said. "We're actually on the ground, meaning I know people in Hezbollah, I know people in the Taliban. I know people in ISIS. I know people in ISIS-K. I've met with radical jihadi weirdos and whack jobs personally."
United Arab Emirates investigators have described the incident aboard FlyDubai flight FZ1073 as an attempted terror attack after the co-pilot allegedly stabbed the captain and tried to hijack the plane, which was carrying more than 170 passengers and crew, most of them Israelis. Australian authorities have also said a counterterrorism unit is investigating the co-pilot’s links to Australia.
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"The bad guys are completely not afraid. They're completely emboldened. They have got the whole world to hate Israel, the whole world to hate us," he said. "It's a tough problem."
Since the incident, there has been renewed vigilance in aviation and foreign airline security. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed his national security council to review security procedures for foreign civil aviation to Israel, while Vice President JD Vance said Monday that flight security procedures are also under review in the U.S.
"I was asked years ago when I was still with the government," Stern said. "A team was put together and the question before the court was, if you were al-Qaeda, what would you do?"
"What I came up with was ... I would get 19 hijackers, and I would hijack four airplanes, and I would fly them into buildings in America, and then issue a communique that said: 20 years of war, you are no safer today than you were before – that for TSA, and Homeland Security, and Iraq, and Afghanistan and all the different things, you are actually no safer, America, today than you were before," he said.
"We're seeing, sadly," he lamented, "that academic hypothetical situation has now become a reality, or certainly a possibility."
Despite President Donald Trump and the War Department's best efforts to rid the world of terrorist groups – and Iran of nuclear weapons aspirations – "you can't bomb your way into peace," Stern claimed.
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"They have been in holy war against us," he added. "We have now engaged in a holy war against them."
"On Ramadan, the holiest month of the year in Islam, on the first day, which is the holiest day, we detonated the leader of the Shia faith, the Ayatollah," he said, likening it to "if somebody assassinated the pope on Easter Sunday while he's giving mass at the Vatican."
Stern explained that rooting out ideological terror in the U.S. is more complex than ever, because even if the border is not open any longer under Trump, the terrorist networks might be infiltrating America with U.S. passport holders – making them tough to investigate, if not impossible to spot before an attack.
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Stern likened it to the release of the suspects in the RAF Fairford investigation – potential terrorist passport holders walking free.
"Until I actually squeeze the triggers, I haven't committed a crime yet," he said. "Now give me an airplane."
"That's the problem."
Stern noted that the nature of America's adversaries in the current conflict is unlike what the U.S. faced in places like Afghanistan.
"We need to remember we are very used to shooting people like the Taliban who don't know what plumbing is – who literally for years lived in caves until we showed up and gave them stuff," he continued. "The bad guys that we're talking about today are extremely sophisticated. They are extremely resourced, extremely resourceful. They're very intelligent, they're very smart, and they're very good at what they do."
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"The Persian Empire is the only empire of empires who have been all the way on top and all the way defeated at the bottom – six times," he said. "They're looking at us going, you're 250 years old. How adorable. You're cute, America."
Stern predicted that some day even 9/11 — which he survived as a first responder — is ultimately going to be dwarfed.
"What will happen, probably is we'll get attacked – just like 9/11, we'll get attacked," he said. "We'll say, 'Oh my God, how did this happen?' People will wake up."
"I promise you there will come a time, it will be, you know, June 26 or whatever, where we're gonna read about 9/11, and we're gonna say, 'Wow, that wasn't so bad, only 3,000 died,'" he warned.
"Why? Because we have created a holy war. We have now gotten into the crazy. And you cannot unring that bell."