Back in 2017, the ISIS militant group’s reign of terror appeared to be coming to an end.
A US-led coalition ousted its fighters from strongholds in Iraq and Syria, where they had ruled with brutality and inspired a series of harrowing attacks on Western cities.
The loss of its bases and the assassination of many of its leaders badly dented its power, and its prominence faded.
The attack in New Orleans on Wednesday brought the group back into stark prominence.
Fifteen people were killed when the driver of a truck slammed into New Year crowds on Bourbon Street — authorities have said the suspect pledged allegiance to ISIS and flew its flag.
Experts and security officials have in recent months issued increasingly urgent warnings of ISIS gathering strength.
The group “has had to adapt after its territorial defeat, I think it is important to highlight that they have remained a continuing threat,” said Jessica White, a terrorism analyst at London’s Royal United Services Institute.
“They are a diffuse and networked organisation that has alliances and branches that continue to wield influence, cause terror, and further their goals,” she told Business Insider on Thursday.
The FBI said it is investigating what ties the suspect, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, may have had with the group.
Authorities have said Jabbar did not act alone; the FBI said it is probing any “potential associations and affiliations.”
ISIS renews itself
ISIS was little-known in 2015, when it shocked the world by seizing control of swaths of Syria and Iraq and putting them under a severe form of Islamic law.
The group became known for atrocities, releasing videos showing the beheading of Western hostages, seizing thousands as slaves, and orchestrating waves of terror attacks in the West.
Its adherents cumulatively killed hundreds of people in attacks on Western cities, including Paris and San Bernardino in 2015, Berlin, Brussels, Nice, and Orlando in 2016, London and Barcelona in 2017.
Attacks in Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia killed many hundreds more.
A US-led campaign, launched under President Barack Obama and continued under President Donald Trump, gradually eroded the group with airstrikes supported by allied militias on the ground.
It culminated with the assassination of its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, by US special forces in 2018.
Trump has since boasted of destroying the group, claiming at last year’s Republican National Convention that “we defeated 100% of ISIS” in his first term.
Since then, the US has maintained a small military presence in northern Syria meant to monitor and extinguish potential resurgence by the group.
But analysts say the group has seized on instability in Afghanistan, where the Taliban regained power after the 2021 US withdrawal, and ongoing chaos in Syria to quietly rebuild its strength.
The group’s Afghan affiliate, ISIS-K, presents a particularly potent threat, wrote Colin Clarke, Director of Policy and Research at The Soufan Group, for Foreign Policy in August.
“It is both pushing its propaganda to a more global audience and threatening attacks farther afield,” he wrote.
ISIS-K was linked to July’s attack on the March 2024 attack on a music venue in Moscow, where 145 people were killed, as well as an attack on a procession in Kerman, Iran, in January 2024 where 95 were killed.
In August, officials foiled a planned ISIS attack at a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna, Austria. The CIA’s deputy director, David Cohen, said extremists planned to kill “a huge number” there.
Tactics to spread terror
One of the main challenges for investigators will be to establish whether the New Orleans attacker took direct instruction from ISIS or was acting on his own volition, Sajjan J. Gohel, International Security Director at the Asia-Pacific Foundation, told CNN.
The group mostly does not directly train extremists at its bases to carry out attacks, unlike the terror group Al-Qaida.
Instead, it largely remotely recruits and directs followers to carry out attacks that don’t require much training, such as vehicle ramming or knife attacks.
Clarke, the ISIS expert, described this approach in his August article, called it a “virtual entrepreneur” model.
“Operatives in Afghanistan or Pakistan make contact with would-be ISIS-K supporters abroad to try to convince them to carry out attacks in the countries where they reside,” wrote Clarke.
Attacks following that model including the 2016 beheading of a Catholic priest in a church in France, according to reports at the time.
The group is now less concerned with recruiting members in Syria and Iraq, and more on inciting attacks, said White, the RUSI expert.
“While the focus has shifted away from gathering followers to a centralised physical Caliphate, this has transformed the messaging to encouraging devotees to commit attacks whenever, wherever, and by whatever means they can,” she said.
The New Orleans attack had “several strategic and symbolic considerations as potentially textbook ISIS,” Gohel said.
Vehicle-rammings have been a feature of many deadly, ISIS-linked attacks.
The group’s sophisticated propaganda is another powerful tool, enabling it to exploit grievances and attract supports anywhere where there is internet access.
In some cases, followers with no direct links to the group have carried out attacks in its name. The 2017 Westminster Bridge attack in London seemed to fit that pattern.
The group’s use of the internet, and success in radicalising those with no previous extremist links make it particularly difficult to tackle.
“None of this is new. They just continue to throw it out every single day,” Aaron Zelin, an expert on jihadist groups at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told NBC News of the group’s methods. “And from their perspective, the hope is that it sticks with somebody,”
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