As authorities began surveying the carnage and searching for clues after Sunday’s mass shooting in Australia, they looked for a marker that has surfaced repeatedly in recent years at scenes of horrific violence.
The black flag of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, is no longer associated with the sprawling territorial “caliphate” the group once controlled in the Syrian desert. It no longer serves as a banner beckoning Islamist militant recruits from across the globe or the symbol of an organization with tight operational control over its terror plots and media profile.
But the discovery of ISIS flags at the scene of the attack on a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney, according to senior officials speaking to the Australian Broadcast Corporation and video footage from the scene, served as a reminder that the Islamic State continues to inspire violence on a global scale with more frequency and tenacity than other terror organizations, according to security officials and terrorism experts.
The Islamic State has gone “from being a governing authority that shocked the world” to an organization that has “reverted to its DNA as a terrorist group that controls no territory but still counts thousands of members,” said Bruce Hoffman, a senior fellow for counterterrorism at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Since U.S.-led forces declared the defeat of the ISIS caliphate in 2019, the Islamic State “has slipped from our minds and our gaze,” Hoffman said, but has not retreated from “its purpose and objective.”
The attack that killed 15 people and wounded dozens of others at Bondi Beach in Sydney was the latest in a series of strikes in recent years where authorities found black flags or other symbols of allegiance to the Islamic State even as they uncovered few signs of direct engagement from the organization’s core in recruiting, radicalizing or tasking suspected followers.
The organization provided a reminder of its presence in Syria with an attack Saturday that killed two U.S. Army soldiers and an American civilian interpreter. U.S. officials said the killing in Palmyra was carried out by a member of Syria’s security forces under investigation for alleged allegiance to the Islamic State organization.
The shooting occurred at a meeting involving U.S. forces from the Iowa National Guard working with Syrian forces that are being absorbed into the country’s interior ministry, according to a person familiar with the U.S. role in the country. The Islamic State threat stems mainly from ISIS-affiliated fighters hiding in the civilian population. But there are about 26,000 people — mostly women and children — in refugee camps that could be vulnerable to future influence and recruiting, the person said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to provide additional context on how the U.S. is addressing the Islamic State threat.
But in many ways the shooting in Syria was an outlier, a rare operation in the Islamic State’s geographic base amid a broader pattern of attacks involving allegedly self-radicalized individuals, according to officials and experts.
The Sydney shooting came almost exactly a year after an attacker allegedly inspired by the Islamic State killed 14 people and injured at least 35 others by ramming his truck into a New Year’s Eve crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. The suspect, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, was a 42-year-old U.S. Army veteran who had posted videos on social media declaring his allegiance to the Islamic State, according to U.S. officials, and, like the Sydney attackers, left an ISIS flag in his vehicle.
In 2024, the Islamic State claimed credit for an attack on a Moscow concert venue in which at least 137 people were killed. That same year the CIA helped disrupt a similar plot by alerting authorities in Austria to an alleged ISIS operation aimed at killing “hundreds of people” at a Taylor Swift concern in Vienna. Other attacks and arrests linked to the Islamic State have targeted locations as disparate as Stockton, California, and Sri Lanka.
The sequence has raised concerns of a resurgence by a group that had staged spectacular attacks in Paris, southern France and San Bernardino a decade ago but was seen as a spent force after being stripped of its territorial caliphate.
In seeking to reestablish its relevance, the Islamic State has exploited outrage among Muslims over Israel’s campaigns against militant groups Hezbollah and Hamas after the latter killed or captured hundreds of Israelis in an Oct. 7, 2023, cross-border invasion, according to European and Arab security officials.
“We have definitely seen an uptick in the online presence of ISIS” over the course of the war in Gaza, said a senior Arab security official speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. “They are exploiting the emotional outrage of Muslims and use reports of [Muslim] women and children being killed or allegedly starved as tools of recruitment.”
The Islamic State no longer has the online presence or media reach it commanded a decade ago when it staged executions of Western journalists and taunted world leaders. But officials said that the organization continues to foment violence with opportunistic online screeds that urge attacks on Western targets using any means available. When the fires broke out in Southern California last year, Hoffman said, Islamic State channels quickly began urging copycat cases of arson.
The father-son suspects in the Sydney attack — Sajid Akram, 50, and Naveed Akram, 24 — were not known to have traveled to Syria or elsewhere. The family’s reported South Asian lineage has raised suspicion among terrorism experts of an affiliation to ISIS-K, or Khorasan, an offshoot based in Pakistan.
The elder Akram was killed in a shootout with police, according to authorities, while the son was wounded and remains hospitalized. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said there was “no evidence of collusion,” suggesting that authorities had yet to uncover operational links to Islamic State leaders.
Even so, Albanese acknowledged that the younger Akram had come under scrutiny of Australian security officials in 2019, an apparent reference to an investigation triggered by his suspected association with other Islamic State followers, according to Australian media reports. An investigation of Akram concluded that “there was no indication of any ongoing threat of him engaging in violence,” Albanese said.
The timing coincides with an Australian investigation of a Sydney resident, Isaac El Matari, who was convicted of planning attacks in Australia “on behalf of the Islamic State,” according to Australian court records.
An Australian citizen, El Matari had traveled to Lebanon in 2017, where he served a brief jail term for attempting to join the Islamic State, according to court records. El Matari returned to Australia where he appears to have been under surveillance before he was charged with prodding others to help him carry out Islamic State-inspired attacks and took preliminary steps including the purchase of a tactical vest at a gun store, according to court records.
At El Matari’s sentencing in 2021, an Australian judge downplayed the threat he posed in dismissive terms that echoed some assessments of the Islamic State after losing its territory, but will now likely be revisited. “He had no followers. He had not persuaded anyone to his cause in Australia,” the judge said. “There was no direct or indirect threat to anyone. Although imbued with extremist ideals, the likelihood of any terrorist act coming to fruition in Australia was very low indeed.”
Aaron Schaffer and Tara Copp contributed to this report.
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