A deadly attack in New Orleans on New Year’s Eve that left 15 dead serves as a disturbing reminder of a bygone era when the transnational terrorist organization known as the Islamic State, or ISIS, commanded the nation’s attention and resources.
The attacker, Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, a 42-year-old Army veteran from Texas, drove his truck into Bourbon Street before being killed in a shootout with police. Flying an ISIS flag from his vehicle, Jabbar posted videos on Facebook shortly before the attack pleading with the group for support.
FBI Deputy Assistant Director Christopher Raia described Jabbar as “100 percent ISIS-inspired” at a briefing Thursday. Raia said Jabbar, who also planted two explosive devices on Bourbon Street that never detonated, claimed to have joined ISIS before last summer. In his videos, Jabbar said he had originally planned to attack his relatives and friends – he had recently gone through a divorce – but was worried the media would not focus on what he called “a war between believers and non-believers”. Authorities are also investigating whether there is any connection between the attack and the truck bombing that occurred the same day outside the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, although it does not yet appear to be the case.
Using trucks and vans to ram into crowds has been a staple of deadly ISIS-linked attacks for years, from Nice in France to Barcelona to Berlin to Stockholm. New Orleans is likely the largest ISIS-inspired attack on American soil since 2016 when gunman Omar Mateen killed 49 people at Pulse, an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Orlando, Florida. The last major ISIS-inspired attack in the US was in 2017, when Sayfullo Saipov drove a truck onto Manhattan’s West Side Highway, killing eight people.
ISIS-linked violence is still common around the world – just this week there was a major suicide attack on a military base in Somalia. The Afghanistan-based affiliate of ISIS-K is particularly ambitious and global in its activities. Last March, it carried out an attack on Moscow’s Crocus Theater that killed more than 130 people, as well as suicide bombings that killed nearly 100 people in Tehran in January 2024. In August, authorities foiled a “fairly advanced” plot by ISIS-K to attack a Taylor Swift concert in Austria.
The fact that there have been no ISIS-inspired attacks in the US in recent years may not be for lack of trying. Aaron Y. Zelin, who researches and tracks jihadist groups at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, notes that in 2024 there were five arrests in the US for ISIS-related plots, including attempts to “target churches in Idaho, LGBTQ ‘facilities.’ in Philadelphia, Jewish centers/synagogues in New York, polling places in Oklahoma City and the Pride parade in Phoenix.” That’s more than zero arrests of this type in 2023.
The fact that one of the group’s self-confessed acolytes has now managed to achieve deadly and tragic effect raises some tough questions about whether ISIS is ready for a resurgence and what it actually means to be “affiliated with ISIS” today.
The “Caliphate” is down, but not out
ISIS traces its origins to 2011, when fighters from al-Qaeda’s Iraqi branch, then led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, traveled to Syria to create a new branch to fight in that country’s civil war. In 2013, al-Baghdadi attempted to merge the Iraqi and Syrian branches, a move rejected by al-Qaeda leaders and leading to a major split in the global jihadist movement.
In 2014, Baghdadi’s group began occupying cities in western Iraq and eventually captured Mosul, Iraq’s largest city. At its height in 2014 and 2015, the group controlled an area the size of Great Britain, which Baghdadi declared a new “caliphate” under his rule. ISIS’s emphasis on controlling territory and imposing its brutal theocratic rule, rather than remaining underground, set it apart from other militant groups, as did the bloody theatricality of its methods: The group burst into the consciousness of many Americans thanks to video recordings of the move by two American journalists.
The US-led military intervention against ISIS began in 2014. In 2019, the group’s last territorial base in Syria fell to the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Al-Baghdadi himself was killed in a US airstrike a few months later. In 2020, President Donald Trump declared in his State of the Union address that “ISIS’s territorial caliphate has been 100 percent destroyed.”
This was basically true, but ISIS survived the territorial caliphate in a more dispersed form. It continues to operate underground and carry out attacks in Iraq and Syria, and is regularly targeted by airstrikes and airstrikes by US forces and their local partners.
But in many ways, what was once known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is now a more decentralized and global organization, with local franchises from Afghanistan to Somalia to West Africa to Mozambique often far more active and dangerous. than the base group. They also operate more like traditional terrorist organizations than the quasi-nation state that ISIS was at its peak.
ISIS also still has a strong presence online, although slightly less than during the caliphate, researchers say. Like other activist groups, it is particularly active in the encrypted messaging app Telegram as well as the decentralized messaging platform Rocket.Chat. (Other social media platforms are more closely monitored, though the widespread distribution of footage of the Crocus attack on X suggests that the site formerly known as Twitter has become more free-for-all in its current form.)
ISIS distinguished itself from al-Qaeda and other groups by its heavy use of propaganda in English and by encouraging sympathizers to carry out attacks on behalf of ISIS. Looks like it just happened in New Orleans.
“Almost every day they publish things about carrying out attacks in English,” said Zelin of the Washington Institute.
A lone wolf or part of a pack?
According to the FBI, Jabbar claimed in videos he posted the night of the attack that he had joined ISIS before last summer, but the FBI’s Raia also emphasized that based on an analysis of Jabbar’s communications and social media accounts, “there is simply nothing a sign… that anyone was helping him in this attack.” In other words, he was acting alone, but at the same time considered himself part of a group.
This is not such a contradiction as it might seem. Some of the largest and deadliest ISIS attacks in the West, such as the 2015 massacre of 130 people at multiple locations in Paris, were coordinated by ISIS itself or carried out by people who had fought and trained with the group in the Middle East.
But that is increasingly rare. As French counterterrorism analyst Wassim Nasr told Vox in July, “All these things were done from ISIS centers, but ISIS no longer has territory. It’s totally dematerialized.” More often, people who want to carry out attacks communicate only with ISIS “cyber trainers” who advise them on planning and logistics.
Sometimes the relationship is even less direct. The Orlando and Manhattan attackers appear to have had no interaction with ISIS abroad. They were “self-radicalized” – inspired by the group’s message and methods to carry out their own attack.
That also appears to be the case with Jabbar, based on statements from law enforcement, though it’s still early days. One development that could change our understanding of the attacks is if ISIS released a pre-recorded message from Jabbar on its own channels. “This would indicate that this was not just someone who was merely inspired by ISIS, but was probably in contact with ISIS operatives,” Zelin said. (In the case of the Moscow attacks, the ISIS-affiliated Amaq news agency released footage of the attack itself.)
So far, none of ISIS’s official channels have claimed credit for the attack, although there’s a good chance they have. ISIS has never been shy about claiming credit, even for attacks it clearly had nothing to do with.
Colin Clarke, a counter-terrorism researcher at the Soufan Center, noted that ISIS-linked Telegram and Rocket.Chat channels called for attacks over Christmas and New Year. Clarke told Vox that the fact that Jabbar doesn’t appear to be part of an organized underground cell isn’t necessarily reassuring.
“To me, the fact that he was a lone actor is more heinous,” he said. “That’s the ISIS model. They want to be able to reach out and inspire someone in the US to do this. Their ultimate goal is to instill fear in the American people.”
Trump vs. ISIS: Retaliation?
Even before the attack in New Orleans, global concerns about the resurgence of ISIS were renewed, especially due to events in the Middle East. As White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said, there are fears that ISIS will “get new oxygen” from the instability in Syria following the ouster of longtime dictator Bashar al-Assad. (The main group that gained power in Syria, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, is itself a successor to an al-Qaeda offshoot that split from ISIS in 2013, though it has also renounced al-Qaeda and has been trying to present more US since Assad’s fall are stepping up their strikes against ISIS targets in Syria in an attempt to prevent them from taking advantage.
There is also concern about the safety of camps in northeastern Syria where thousands of ISIS fighters and their families have been held for years. These camps are under the control of the US-backed, predominantly Kurdish SDF, which is currently under threat from the Turkish military and its local proxies.
“ISIS will be a policy issue for the (incoming) Trump administration,” said Javed Ali, a longtime FBI terrorism analyst who served on the National Security Council during Trump’s first term. “Despite the fact that ISIS is not the organization it was ten years ago, we need to look at our counter-terrorism approach differently.”
Although Trump often touts the defeat of the ISIS caliphate among his first-term accomplishments, he has also often expressed a desire to scale back US commitments in the Middle East, including removing troops in Syria currently engaged in fighting ISIS remnants. (For what it’s worth, the president-elect’s first reaction to the attack was to falsely claim that the US-born Jabbar was an immigrant.)
Overall, the fight against terrorism is a much less important issue for US national security than it was a decade ago, as attention and resources have shifted to the “great power competition” with China and Russia. That’s an understandable and mostly welcome development, but a few more events like the one we just saw in New Orleans could change that trend very quickly.