The killing of 14 people on New Year’s Day in New Orleans was the latest sign of a resurgence in radical Islamist terrorism. Some of the attacks — like the one last week — seem to have been merely inspired by ISIS, the network of groups that are offshoots of Al Qaeda. In other cases, ISIS groups played an active role in the planning.
In today’s newsletter, we’ll detail the scope of the recent terrorism and explain the main reasons for ISIS’s resurgence.
A catalog of violence
The list of attacks and plots either inspired or aided by ISIS over the past five years is longer than many people may realize. It includes:
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Attacks in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Niger, Pakistan and Syria that together have killed hundreds of people.
Why now
ISIS, also known as the Islamic State, began in Iraq two decades ago during the U.S. war there. It once controlled a large piece of territory in Iraq and Syria, but the U.S., under the Trump administration, largely defeated ISIS there.
Today, it is a loose network of chapters with a shared fundamentalist Sunni Muslim ideology. Its sympathizers have attacked Shiite Muslims, in Iran and elsewhere, as well as Christians and Jews. ISIS claims authority over all Muslims and has sometimes clashed with other extremist Sunni groups, including the Taliban.
There are at least four reasons for the recent resurgence.
First, recent coups in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger have left a power vacuum in the Sahel region of West Africa. “The breakdown in governance in the Sahel has led to turmoil and insecurity that’s created space for bad actors including ISIS and Al Qaeda,” our colleague Eric Schmitt said. (We recommend this story by Eric and Ruth Maclean.)
Second, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 reduced the pressure on an ISIS chapter there known as ISIS-K, and it has since expanded beyond Afghanistan. ISIS-K was behind the Iran bombing, the Moscow concert attack and the Taylor Swift plot.
“The one silver lining in all three of these plots is that U.S. intelligence detected them in advance,” Eric said. (The U.S. warned Iran and Russia about the two plots there, to no avail.) “This shows that even though U.S. forces can no longer apply pressure on the group in Afghanistan, U.S. spy agencies have made tapping into their electronics a high priority.”
Third, ISIS has begun to reassert itself in the parts of Iraq and Syria that it once controlled. And the downfall of President Bashar al-Assad seems likely to give the group more ability to operate, as Charles Lister, a terrorism expert at the Middle East Institute, explained in a recent Times Opinion essay.
Fourth, Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the ensuing war seem to have encouraged more attacks. Hamas fighters streamed some of their killings that day partly to inspire copycat terrorism. “We’ve seen the threat from foreign terrorists rise to a whole ’nother level after Oct. 7,” Christopher Wray, the F.B.I. director, told Congress last spring.
Michael Crowley, a diplomatic reporter at The Times, notes that Israel’s destruction of Gaza and recent U.S. airstrikes in Yemen have also caused anger in much of the Muslim world. Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the New Orleans attacker, seemed upset both by problems in his personal life and by the carnage in the Middle East, his half brother told The Times. “He didn’t like it — he said it was genocide on both sides, inhumane,” the half brother said.
The bottom line: ISIS remains weaker than it once was, but it still presents a threat — one that’s “more diverse, more complex and more decentralized” than in the past, as Brett Holmgren, the acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center, recently put it.
For more
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