Many years have passed since ISIS, also known as Islamic State, ruled over a large portion of Syria and northern Iraq. During that period, it orchestrated a number of devastating terror attacks in European cities and produced affiliates throughout Africa and Asia. However, it continues to operate as a terror organization in over a dozen nations, and in recent years, it has encouraged and assisted people and cells throughout Russia and Europe.
Even while ISIS is no longer a self-declared caliphate over sizable cities but rather a loosely connected network, it is by no means dormant. The deadly March attack on a shopping mall in Moscow, which left at least 150 people dead and over 500 injured, was the most well-known incident claimed by ISIS in 2024.
Like the events in Syria, it brought ISIS back into the public eye. Nearly six years after the “caliphate” ended, US officials fear that instability in the wake of the fall of the Assad government might allow ISIS to reestablish itself in Iraq and spread beyond its isolated desert strongholds. Western security agencies are also always concerned that those who are influenced by ISIS may carry out low-tech assaults like shootings, stabbings, and collisions with crowds. Such schemes are notoriously hard to uncover.
Over 100 people have been killed in vehicle assaults carried out in the name of ISIS in recent years, notably in Nice, Barcelona, Berlin, and New York. Alethea Duncan, an FBI associate special agent in charge, reported that an ISIS flag was found on the suspect’s vehicle’s trailer hitch following the incident in New Orleans. According to Duncan, FBI officials are currently looking for anybody who could have collaborated with the suspect, 42-year-old Texas man and Army veteran Shamsud-Din Jabbar, to organize or carry out the attack.
She stated during a press conference on Wednesday, “We do not believe that Jabbar was solely responsible.” “Every lead, including those of his known associates, is being aggressively pursued.”
Late on Wednesday, US President Joe Biden stated that the FBI had informed him that the driver had shared films on social media “just hours” prior to the assault, “showing that he was inspired” by ISIS. During a gunfight with police, the suspect was dead.
Al Qaeda and ISIS have frequently urged supporters to conduct “do-it-yourself” strikes. The 2013 Boston Marathon bombers constructed their devices using a “recipe” taken from an al Qaeda magazine on the internet.
Rita Katz, executive director of SITE Intelligence, a non-governmental organization that tracks terror groups, claims that events in the Middle East have driven already radicalized people to action.
She points out that since Israel launched its attack on Gaza in 2023, there has been a rise in “lone wolf” plans in the name of ISIS, including the murder of an Orthodox Jewish man in Zurich, a mass stabbing at a festival in Solingen, Germany, and an alleged plot against Taylor Swift concerts in Vienna. A 15-year-old kid of Tunisian and Swiss ancestry in that case posted a video in which he vowed to join ISIS, stating that he was “responding to the call of the Islamic State to its warriors to kill the Jews and Christians and their criminal friends.”
Within days following Hamas’s October 7 strikes, ISIS attempted to take advantage of the situation in Gaza. In a January address last year, SITE Intelligence described ISIS spokesperson Abu Hudhayfah al-Ansari as saying that Muslims should “hunt your prey — the Jews, Christians, and their allies — in the streets and alleyways of America, Europe, and the world.”
“Direct your actions at the easy targets before the difficult, the civilian targets before the military, and the religious targets like synagogues and churches before anything else,” ISIS advised its supporters, as it had in previous years.
His “recurring nightmare… has been the so-called lone wolf, often radicalized over the internet and who has managed to avoid coming across our radar,” according to David Irvine, the chief of Australian intelligence at the time, 10 years ago. Not much has changed in that regard.
