BREAKING: Iraqi PM says terrorist plot to attack US/Paris subway uncovered.

NEW YORK (AP) — Iraq's prime minister said Thursday his country's intelligence operation has uncovered a plot for an imminent attack on subway systems in United States and Paris.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said he was told of the plot by Baghdad, and that it was the work of foreign fighters of the Islamic State group in Iraq. Asked if the attacks were imminent, he said, "Yes."

Asked if the attacks had been thwarted, he said, "No." Al-Abadi said the United States had been alerted.

He made the remarks at a meeting with journalists on the sidelines of a gathering of world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly.

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Khorasan Group terror plot exposed ... planned to blow up airliners.

WASHINGTON

By KEN DILANIAN

AP Intelligence Writer

The U.S. decision to strike the Khorasan Group to stop a possible terror attack represents a significant expansion of the largely secret war against core al-Qaida, a group President Barack Obama has proclaimed was "a shadow of its former self."

Administration officials said Tuesday they have been watching the Khorasan Group, an al-Qaida cell in Syria, for years. But Obama had resisted taking military action in Syria to avoid inadvertently helping President Bashar Assad, a leader the U.S. would like to see gone. That changed, officials said, because intelligence showed that the Khorasan Group was in the final stages of plotting attacks against the U.S. and Europe, most likely an attempt to blow up an airplane in flight.

On the same night that U.S. and Arab allies carried out more than 200 airstrikes against the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq, the U.S. on its own launched more than 20 Tomahawk cruise missiles and other ordinance against eight Khorasan Group targets near Aleppo in northwestern Syria, Pentagon officials said.

It's not clear yet whether the group's leader, identified by U.S. officials as Muhsin al-Fadhli, was killed in the strikes. He is a Kuwaiti who spent time in Iran and has long been identified as a significant figure in al-Qaida.

But regardless of the impact, the need for such an operation against the Khorasan Group dealt a blow to the notion, oft-repeated by Obama administration officials, that core al-Qaida has been significantly diminished as a threat to the United States.

The Khorasan Group, after all, is made up of core al-Qaida veterans.

"There are remnants of core al-Qaida still left that are still a very potent threat," said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., a member of the House Intelligence Committee.

"What this shows is that al-Qaida has not been decimated," said Seth Jones, a counterterrorism analyst at the Rand Corp. "This is a network that spans multiple countries."

The attacks add Syria to a long list of nations in which the Obama administration has taken lethal action against al-Qaida militants, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia.

The Islamic State has broken with al-Qaida, and, for all its brutality, is not believed to be plotting attacks against the West.

In contrast, the Khorasan Group is a cell of al-Qaida veterans of wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan who traveled to Syria to link up with the Nusra Front, the al-Qaida affiliate there. U.S. intelligence officials say the group has been working with bomb makers from al-Qaida's Yemen affiliate to perfect explosives that can fool Western airport security measures, including, one official said, a bomb in a toothpaste tube.

Obama presided over a dramatic expansion of secret CIA drone strikes in Pakistan that dealt significant blows to al-Qaida's leadership, and he ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. He expanded the drone campaign to Yemen and Somalia, all under a veil of secrecy.

For a time, the drone campaign seemed to have shattered al-Qaida. While Obama has been vocal about the threat from al-Qaida's affiliates, he said in his 2013 State of the Union address that "the organization that attacked us on 9/11 is a shadow of its former self."

But the shadow was growing. Even as Obama spoke, some veteran al-Qaida operatives had traveled from Pakistan to Syria, where officials say they linked up with the Nusra Front and began recruiting people from the West for attacks against the U.S. and Europe. In early 2013, the CIA began developing "targeting packages" on militants in Syria -- intelligence dossiers that could be used to target them for drone strikes.

In the end Obama opted to use the military, not the CIA, to attack the Khorasan Group, in keeping with his desire to move the CIA away from lethal drone strikes.

A senior administration official said the plan to strike the Khorasan Group "is something that has been on our radar for several months, and it is an action that we were contemplating separate and apart from" the airstrikes against Islamic State group positions in Syria.

Briefing reporters at the Pentagon on Tuesday, Lt. Gen. William Mayville, who directs operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the Khorasan Group was nearing "the execution phase of an attack either in Europe or the (U.S.) homeland."

However, two U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss classified assessments, said there was no particular location or target that had come to the attention of U.S. intelligence agencies.

In a memo released in February 2013, the Justice Department disclosed that in the view of government lawyers, "an 'imminent' threat of violent attack against the United States does not require ... clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future."

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Intelligence agencies scramble to find missing airliners before 911 anniversary.

USA TODAY: Reports that 11 commercial jetliners are missing from the main airport in Libya's capital of Tripoli are raising fears that militants could use them in terrorist attacks to mark the 13th anniversary of 9/11 next week.

The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news website, cited anonymous sources who said intelligence agencies have warned the jets could be used in attacks in North Africa and elsewhere on Sept. 11.

The date also marks the second anniversary of the Libyan terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said, "We have nothing to confirm these reports about missing airliners."

A spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council, Bernadette Meehan, also said there's been no confirmation that aircraft had been stolen.

Images have surfaced online showing militants posing with the jetliners taken when the militants overran Tripoli's airport last month in a fierce battle that left much of the airport and its aircraft damaged.

In the past four months, a renegade general has battled Islamic militants in the eastern city of Benghazi — cradle of the 2011 uprising that toppled Moammar Gadhafi — as powerful regional militias have fought for control of the Tripoli airport. Islamist-allied militias have seized virtually all of the capital.

Moroccan military expert Abderrahmane Mekkaoui said there was "credible intelligence" that one Libyan militia "is plotting to use the planes in attacks on the (region) on the 9/11 anniversary," The Huffington Post reported, citing Al Jazeera television.

An aviation security expert said the planes, if actually seized by terrorists, would pose more of a threat to countries near Libya than the U.S. homeland.

Any stolen aircraft from Libya would unlikely penetrate post-9/11 U.S. air defense and security measures, but they could pose a threat to targets that are much closer, said Jeffrey Price, author of Practical Aviation Security and professor at Metropolitan State University in Denver.

Airliners are required to file flight plans before entering U.S. airspace, and air-traffic monitors would be looking for aircraft matching the description of any stolen planes, Price said. An airliner could try to fly below radar to avoid detection, but the U.S. military has developed systems to detect and stop low flying threats, he said.

Price said most countries near Libya, including in Europe, do not have the same air-defense capabilities and would be more at risk.

The reports of the missing planes, which first surfaced in mid-August, likely sparked an international search for the planes by intelligence agencies, Price said. "It's hard to hide a big jet," he said.