WASHINGTON (AP) — After Hamas launched the deadly assault on Israel that triggered retaliatory airstrikes on Gaza, FBI Director Christopher Wray said he feared the Middle East violence could embolden individuals or groups to carry out attacks inside the United States.
Months later, after extremists with the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate killed more than 140 people at a Russian concert hall, Wray sounded the alarm about the potential for a similar coordinated attack closer to home.
Following these months of warnings about a resurgent terrorism threat, an Army veteran inspired by IS slammed a pickup truck into crowds celebrating New Year’s in New Orleans. But the culprit did not coordinate with international operatives, nor was he part of any broader plot. Instead, he embodied a longstanding concern that snapped into focus in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks and never evaporated: the threat from homegrown extremists who radicalize on their own before committing mass violence in the name of foreign groups.
“I have never seen the threat landscape this worrying, not just from a counterterrorism perspective but from state-sponsored threats,” said Christopher Costa, a former career intelligence officer and senior director for counterterrorism at the White House National Security Council in the first Trump administration.
He said the “grab-bag of grievances” that may have driven 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar to act — he had multiple divorces and financial pressures and noted in a video posted before the rampage that he thought of killing his family — was consistent with the profile of other attackers. And it coincided with a climate of global instability that has given extra incentive to troubled people prone to violence, from the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks that launched the war in Gaza to the dramatic overthrow last month of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
“You pick the grievance, and then you’ll find the ideology to act on it,” Costa said. “Now it includes Oct. 7, it includes IS — and why IS is so important right now is because it is resurging as a result of what IS could perceive as a victory in Syria.”
The New Orleans attack that killed 14 is thought to be the deadliest IS-inspired assault on U.S. soil since a 2016 massacre of 49 people inside a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, by a gunman who professed allegiance to the group’s then-leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. That shooting occurred at a time when the FBI was racing to disrupt a surge in plots by “lone wolves” who were drawn to act by Islamic State propaganda or even to travel to the group’s so-called caliphate in Syria and Iraq.
The threat never abated, as evidenced by the FBI’s October arrest of an Afghan man in Oklahoma who authorities say was inspired by the Islamic State group to plot an Election Day attack.
But more brazen and coordinated efforts originating from overseas have drawn greater public attention recently, such as Iranian assassination plots targeting public officials, including President-elect Donald Trump. Add to the mix the turmoil in the Middle East, which has prompted demonstrations in the U.S., the 2021 collapse of the Afghan government that gave rise to Taliban leadership, and concerns about those with Islamic State ties entering the U.S. through the southern border.
The swirl of concerns led Wray to tell The Associated Press in August that he was “hard-pressed to think of a time in my career where so many different kinds of threats are all elevated at once.”
That such a deadly assault in New Orleans was carried out by a lone actor without any direction from overseas underscores the volatile and unpredictable nature of the terrorism threat as well as the challenges in stopping violence from such individuals.
“It’s a very, very difficult law enforcement challenge, much more difficult than dealing with someone who may have had active communications with overseas actors, for example, or having a distinct online profile in which they were consuming and participating in extremist activity in the online space,” said Nicholas Rasmussen, the counterterrorism coordinator for the Department of Homeland Security.
“If you don’t have that,” he added, “then you are very much reliant on that bystander phenomenon.”
There’s no indication that Jabbar, who was fatally shot in a firefight with police, was ever on law enforcement’s radar prior to the attack. FBI investigators, however, have turned up significant signs of planning, including suspected bomb-making materials in his short-term New Orleans rental property and his Houston home, the FBI said in a statement Friday.
Though officials say he wasn’t aided by conspirators, Jabbar’s method — ramming a truck into bystanders — is a favored option for Islamic State followers, and a pro-IS media unit on Dec. 30 encouraged attacks at New Year’s Eve celebrations in the U.S. and other countries, according to an intelligence bulletin from the FBI and DHS seen by The Associated Press.
The terrorism threat is set to be inherited in just over two weeks by Trump and an FBI that’s bracing for a dramatic leadership change with the nomination of Kash Patel. Patel has long been skeptical of the FBI’s use of its national security powers and has spoken of breaking off the bureau’s “intel shops” from the rest of its crime-fighting activities. It’s unclear how the New Orleans attack might affect any plans he has if confirmed to the post.
There’s no question that the turmoil in Syria — and what it could mean for the Islamic State group’s ability to reconstitute and inspire supporters in the West — is a major national security wild card.
Assad’s ouster and the arrival of the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, as Syria’s main power broker have been met with degrees of relief but also alarm. Apart from HTS’ past affiliation with al-Qaida, the collapse of Assad’s military has raised fears of a power vacuum that many believe IS will seek to exploit.
Assad’s departure also has opened a window for Turkey to expand operations against Kurdish fighters in northern Syria that it believes are terrorists. The Syrian Defense Forces have been key U.S. allies in the fight against IS and operate detention camps for thousands of captured foreign fighters.
U.S. and European officials are concerned that intensified Turkish attacks against the SDF may contribute to a potential IS resurgence.
None of that conflict made a New Year’s Day attack on U.S. soil by someone claiming inspiration from IS easily predictable, especially since such violence is far rarer than in the Middle East or Europe, said Natana DeLong-Bas, a professor of theology and Islamic Studies at Boston College.
Even so, she noted, “any idiot” can rent a vehicle.
“The means that he used were very simple and straightforward and accessible to anyone,” she said.
Story by Eric Tucker Associated Press. Associated Press writers Rebecca Santana and Matthew Lee in Washington and Jim Mustian in Black Mountain, North Carolina, contributed to this report.
