The ISIS-inspired attack in New Orleans underscores how extremism online and political divisions at home have created “a perfect storm” for radicalization in America, experts say, with law enforcement struggling to track an increasingly fractured threat.
Finding and accessing extremist communities online has never been easier, the threat has never been higher, and the ideology of those carrying out attacks has never been more splintered, according to the experts.
“What the FBI and law enforcement in general are dealing with right now is a threat landscape that is both diverse and complicated,” said Seamus Hughes, a senior researcher and policy associate with the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center at the University of Nebraska Omaha. “That makes things a little harder for law enforcement.”
“We have a level of polarization in the U.S. that’s an important factor,” he said. “The online environment has algorithms that are set up to make you angry. And all that is playing into a perfect storm of factors that are leading to an increase in radicalization.”
According to the federal government, the main terror threat to the U.S. now is lone actors inspired by extremism ideology. Those ideologies range widely. The majority of attackers are on the far right, as in the 2022 Buffalo supermarket shooting. But sometimes, as in the New Orleans attack, the driving ideology is radical Islamism. Occasionally, it’s far-left or anti-Trump, as in the 2017 attack on Republican members of Congress and staffers at a baseball practice outside Washington and the apparent assassination attempt of Trump in Florida last year, or at other times a mix of ideologies, what FBI Director Christopher Wray has called “salad bar extremism.”
But the majority of people who become radicalized will never commit an act of terror.
“Radicalization is not the problem. … The problem is mobilization to violence,” said John Horgan, a psychologist and director of the Violent Extremism Research Group at Georgia State University. “There are some common denominators, but we haven’t made much progress in terms of trying to predict who is going to become involved in terrorism.”
For those who do go from radicalization to violence, the ideals they espouse are often secondary, experts in the psychology of terrorism said.
“We’re seeing more and more people sort of pick and choose their own ideology to suit their own grievances,” Horgan said. “They look to find a reason to make sense of what they have already decided they want to do.”
The picture that has emerged thus far of the attacker in New Orleans, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, seems to fit that profile. Jabbar appears to have long been an observant but not a radical Muslim. And according to authorities, he posted videos online before the attack in which he professed his support for the Islamic State terrorist group and stated that he had originally planned to hurt his family and friends but grew concerned that news headlines in the aftermath would not focus on the “war between the believers and the disbelievers,” and so decided to kill strangers instead.
While authorities have not yet confirmed a motivation for the car bomb that exploded in a Tesla Cybertruck in front of the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas the same day, experts noted its political symbolism and parallels with the New Orleans attack — carried out by a veteran acting alone, using a rented vehicle as a weapon.
“Both attacks have symbolism,” noted Christopher O’Leary, a former executive with the FBI’s counterterrorism division, now with the Soufan Group, a global intelligence consultancy. “One with an ISIS flag, but the other one is likely intentional that it was the Tesla truck parked in front of the Trump Hotel, and like most terrorism incidents, it was limited violence and limited damage.”
The real motivation for almost all attacks like these is “the desire for significance and mattering,” said Arie Kruglanski, a psychologist and co-director of the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism at the University of Maryland. “That desire is seen to be satisfied through an act of violence on behalf of some cause. … The contents of the ideology, the contents of the narrative do not matter.”
Why people radicalize
Experts agree that there is no one profile for people who commit extremist attacks and that terrorism today is more diverse than ever. But the process of and risk factors for radicalization are well understood.
“Radicalization is a process of adopting an increasingly negative view of the enemy group and endorsing increasingly harmful actions against them. People are more prone to radicalize when facing uncertainty or disruption in their lives, for instance losing a job or the death of a loved one, but this isn’t always the case,” J.M. Berger, an extremism researcher with the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, said in an email.
Societal trends over the last several decades, from the impacts of the 2008 financial crisis to the pandemic, have exacerbated those feelings of disruption and destabilization for many people, said Kruglanski. “When people feel disempowered because of immigration, because of economic inequalities, because of losing their job in the pandemic, or whatever it is, they are motivated.” That’s when someone may be compelled to take violent action on behalf of a radical ideology.
Recent research has begun to focus on how veterans in particular — like the perpetrators in both the New Year’s Day incidents — may be susceptible to moving from radicalization to violent extremist action, finding military experience a potential risk factor for attempted and actual terrorism.
“It’s because veterans are competent. It’s because they are skilled. It’s because they care about people other than themselves,” explained Horgan, who testified to Congress about the risks for veterans in 2022. Those qualities make them not just susceptible, but recruitable. “These are the qualities that make them attractive to terrorist groups. We warned Congress about this two years ago, and it just completely fell on deaf ears.”
The details that have emerged so far about Jabbar follow the known pattern of how a veteran can be radicalized to violence, experts said.
In the years leading up to the attack in New Orleans, he went through his third divorce, fell into deep debt and lost his corporate job. Divorce court records from January 2022 show him detailing business losses and credit card debt in the tens of thousands of dollars and more than $27,000 in overdue mortgage payments. By August of that year, he had just $2,012 in his bank accounts, according to filings in the divorce case.
While it is still unclear exactly how or when Jabbar was radicalized to the ISIS ideology he espoused in videos on his way to the attack, his methods follow a pattern for ISIS attacks, experts said. The New Orleans attack was the second deadliest on U.S. soil tied in some way to a foreign terrorist organization since 9/11, behind the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016 in Orlando, Florida, in which the attacker pledged allegiance to ISIS.
‘We can’t prevent all of the attacks all of the time’
After several years of reduced activity in the U.S., 2024 saw a rise in Islamist terror attacks and foiled plots, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Extremism, which tracks extremist attacks and confirmed plots around the country.
That shift had the center’s vice president, Oren Segal, worried even before the New Orleans attack, he said. “It was alarming to us that after subsiding for so many years, there were indications that more and more people who subscribe to this ideology were willing to try to engage in this activity.”
“Part of this may be in response to groups abroad regrouping, part of it may be to the Israel and Palestinian conflict,” he said. “There were many signs that this type of activity was increasing.”
Segal’s center publishes data on terror attacks and plots in the U.S., including any associated ideologies. Its tally currently shows that Islamist extremist incidents are a far smaller portion of incidents than those associated with far-right ideologies.
Federal law enforcement has underscored those same trends for years. While the threat of Islamist terrorism has not gone away in the U.S., the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism, according to a 2024 Department of Justice report.
In the last five years, the FBI has ramped up its efforts on combatting domestic terrorism based on those rising threats. The agency has for a decade consistently had around 1,000 active investigations into Islamist extremists annually, but more than doubled its investigations into fringe political extremist threats, mostly from the far-right, from 2020 to 2022, jumping from 1,000 to 2,700 annual active investigations, according to data released in 2023.
Law enforcement has had success at preventing Islamist extremist attacks in the U.S. in recent years, said Berger, the Middlebury extremism researcher, attributing how few have succeeded in part because the FBI has “thoroughly compromised ISIS communication channels.” But that success makes the New Orleans attack stand out even further.
“What we will see in the coming days and weeks is whether there were significant missed opportunities to prevent this attack, or whether it’s just the law of averages,” Berger said. “The sad fact is that we can’t prevent all of the attacks all of the time.”
Donald Trump’s re-election and the beginning of his new administration also raise the possibility that there will be attacks associated with the left or with anti-Trump ideology and feelings. Ryan Routh, the man charged in connection with the apparent attempt to assassinate Trump in Florida this fall, was allegedly angry at Trump over his policy toward Iran and Ukraine.
“With President Trump coming back into power, terrorism professionals and experts expect that we’re going to see a slower burn, but an emergence of more of a radical left,” said the Soufan Group’s O’Leary. “If President Trump would have lost, I think we would have had immediate political violence. Since he won, I think we will see a slower burn.”
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