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New York, NY - Jihadists are waging a psychological war against Americans—planting suspicious, but harmless, bags in public places to create fear and tie up police and bomb squads, officials said.

The “battle of suspicious bags”—encouraged by an unknown poster to a known jihadi website—suggested an “invasion of suspicious bags” in “the heart of Washington and New York,” the FBI’s Washington Field Office Intelligence Division noted in a May 27 report.

“The stated goal of the campaign was to exploit desensitization of first responders,” the report said, according to ABC News.

The FBI report did not include the full text of the jihadi post, but ABC News reported that “the poster suggested packing bags with innocuous items and placing them in public areas has the capability to occupy response assets and disrupt public infrastructure and transportation.”

There was an increase in calls to the NYPD concerning suspicious packages in the immediate aftermath of the May 1 Times Square bombing attempt, officials said.

During the week right after the failed attack there were 140 calls a day to the police—compared with 90 per day in the week prior to the attack.

The Wall Street Journal reported that cops checked out 493 suspicious packages between four-day span following the botched attack, compared with 381 in the same period a year ago.

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