Demonstrators chant pro-Islamic State group slogans as they carry the group’s flags in entrance of the provincial authorities headquarters in Mosul, Iraq, on June 16, 2014.
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The FBI says the person accountable for the ramming assault in New Orleans that killed at the very least 14 individuals, labored alone and executed his plan after being impressed by the terrorist group ISIS.
Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a 42-year-old Military veteran from Houston, was killed in an change of gunfire with police following the assault. As he drove from Houston to New Orleans, the FBI says he printed movies on-line proclaiming his help for ISIS.
In them, he mentioned he joined ISIS earlier than the summer time of 2024, based on FBI Deputy Assistant Director Christopher Raia.
This newest assault underscores the continued resonance of ISIS ideology “to people susceptible or amenable to radicalization and recruitment,” much more than a decade after the group was at its peak, mentioned Bruce Hoffman, senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland safety on the Council on International Relations.
“Defeating the terrorist group and seizing territory from them and even killing tens of thousands of its fighters, we’re learning tragically now, is still very different from effectively countering an ideology and its continued attraction to individuals,” Hoffman added.
A quick historical past of ISIS
ISIS, a Salafi-jihadist group, rose to international prominence in 2014 when its fighters took over huge swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria. The group used its rising international place to name upon followers from world wide emigrate to Syria or Iraq to determine a caliphate, Hoffman mentioned. Upwards of 40,000 international fighters from at the very least 120 international locations answered that decision and got here to the caliphate, he mentioned.
“But at the same time, ISIS very explicitly said, even if you can’t come to the Levant to fight alongside us, you can use whatever is within your reach in your home countries to carry out attacks in support of our overall aims,” Hoffman mentioned. “And this almost immediately precipitated a series of inspired ISIS attacks.”
By 2019, ISIS was weakened following a world coordinated effort to defeat the terrorist group and it subsequently misplaced most of its bodily territory in Iraq and Syria.
Devorah Margolin, a senior fellow with the Washington Institute for Close to East Coverage, mentioned the group’s lack of bodily territory has not fully diminished its energy. “It continues to carry out attacks. It continues to operate its affiliates. It continues to recruit. It continues to publish propaganda,” Margolin mentioned. “The group is still in existence, just not necessarily how we thought about it when it was controlling physical territory in Syria and Iraq.”
The Well-liked Mobilization Forces show weapons seized from ISIS in Salahuddin province, north of Baghdad, Iraq, in 2023.
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The attract
ISIS embraced “new” types of media when it started to emerge, Margolin mentioned. Fb, Twitter, Telegram, YouTube all provided new avenues to unfold its message to males, ladies and youngsters world wide.
“When Islamic State first came onto the scene, they were kind of seen as the new kids on the block of jihadist groups,” Margolin mentioned. They used brief, flashy movies (at instances depicting graphic violence), and do-it-yourself magazines printed in a number of languages — all of which contributed to their means to unfold their agenda to a really broad viewers, she mentioned.
ISIS embraced “new” types of media when it started to emerge. Fb, Twitter, Telegram, YouTube all provided new avenues to unfold its message and affect world wide.
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Evan Vucci/AP
ISIS has now been largely pushed out of most mainstream social media websites and onto the darkish net and encrypted platforms, however there are nonetheless methods to entry the fabric, mentioned Daniel Byman, the director of the Warfare, Irregular Threats, and Terrorism Program on the Heart for Strategic and Worldwide Research, and different specialists.
It is nonetheless unclear what Jabbar’s motivation was for becoming a member of ISIS. He was a U.S. citizen and Military veteran who served as a human assets and IT specialist from March 2007 till January 2015, serving an 11-month stint in Afghanistan beginning in February 2009. He later served within the Military Reserves as an IT specialist till July 2020. On the finish of his service, he was a workers sergeant.
Anybody might be drawn into extremism, Margolin mentioned.
“There’s no one profile of an American who joins the Islamic State,” she mentioned. “It’s really important to remember that this is a homegrown threat. This is a threat that has emerged from grievances that people feel here in the United States.” These grievances might embody a traumatic occasion, a divorce, monetary troubles, or political motivations.
What does the longer term maintain?
Margolin estimates that about 5,000 to 10,000 insurgents are nonetheless affiliated with ISIS — a far cry from its peak of tens of hundreds. Even with these lowered numbers, the group has its eyes set on rebuilding. The present energy vacuum in Syria presents a main alternative for ISIS to attempt to regain its outdated territory, she famous.
Up to now 12 months, U.S. authorities officers, together with FBI Director Christopher Wray, have warned concerning the attainable resurgence of ISIS. They are saying it is an actual risk that might manifest in main, orchestrated assaults on the U.S. and different nations. However the world ought to anticipate to proceed to see these people impressed by ISIS launching assaults across the globe, Margolin and Hoffman mentioned.
“That’s why I think we have to [be] on our guard going forward and be concerned about replication of the events in New Orleans,” Hoffman mentioned.
