It will be a busy next couple of days for our island's emergency management and law enforcement personnel as they are brought up to speed on the latest in terrorist trends. Various government agencies are gaining valuable training from the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Bombing Prevention.

While not every threat is legitimate our emergency management and law enforcement personnel must be prepared to take every threat seriously. Department of Homeland Security instructor Curt Tilley told KUAM News, "It's all part of our See Something Say Something program to be aware of and that we want everyone to hit those awareness levels so that kind of what this is. This is all awareness level training that includes and incorporates the latest trends and tactics that we are seeing around the world," he said.

The training covers three key topics, the first of which is improvised explosive device search procedures. "It's an IED awareness," Tilley explained. "We break down what an IED is how we identify it an IED can be anything its just up to the imagination of the person that is building it. But there are some similar and common components that are included in all of them."

He says they will discuss the trends and how the components are improvised. The focus then shifts to IED counterterrorism to respond to suspicious packages and items, with Tilley saying, "If you have what you believe to be an IED how that's responded to specifically how you search a facility search a building search the exterior and we get into different search procedures tactics things like that."

But knowing how to respond to threats is not the only focus. Tilley says he is also sharing counterterrorism approaches, saying, "It is being aware of how IEDs are used by different groups and really just what those different group tactics and techniques are. We will do everything from the international terrorist groups we'll have some extensive discussion on ISIS and Al Qaeda and some of these different more major groups."

He says in focusing on the terrorist group they will also look at domestic groups and organizations recognized by the government before touching on the home grown extremists and the "lone wolf" he says they will discuss how to recognize extremism and how to thwart events by understanding what to look for. Lastly, Tilley focuses on IED awareness and bomb threat management sharing how to assess the threat and manage the threat to determine if it is a real threat or not so that resources can be used better when responding to the threats.