ISIS ‘on the rebound’: New Orleans assault newest signal of terror group’s resurgence

Here’s the disturbing reality behind the New Year’s Day ISIS-inspired assault in New Orleans: Military officials and national security insiders fear that a perfect storm is forming around the world that could lead to more deadly terrorist attacks on U.S. shores.

Even before U.S. Army veteran Shamsud-Din Jabbar allegedly drove a vehicle into a crowd on Bourbon Street and killed 14 people on New Year’s Day, there has been growing resignation in foreign policy circles that the conditions are ripe for both an Islamic State resurgence abroad and for the extremist group to potentially find a new pool of willing recruits in the U.S., Europe and Asia willing to carry out acts of violence. The more territory the group controls — and the safer its leaders feel from attack by the U.S. or its counterterrorism allies — the easier it is to plan operations abroad or to undertake coordinated recruiting efforts online, teach would-be terrorists how to build bombs, or otherwise map out jihadist missions across the globe.

The radical Islamist movement no longer controls the vast “caliphate” it ruled straddling Syria and Iraq a decade ago, driven from its fortress by a U.S.-led counterterrorism offensive.

But the once-mighty terror outfit is quickly regaining strength across sub-Saharan Africa, where U.S. and international officials warn that weak central governments are ill-equipped to stop it. In Afghanistan, the Islamic State’s local affiliate organization, ISIS-K, has greatly expanded its reach in the more than three years since U.S. troops left the country. ISIS-K’s rise is perhaps best exemplified by its attack on a Moscow concert hall last March that killed more than 140 people.

But for the U.S., the most immediate threat seems to emanate from Syria, where longtime dictator Bashar Assad’s government was overthrown last month during a surprise offensive by rebel forces. The U.S. quietly more than doubled the number of troops in Syria from 900 to about 2,000 during the collapse of the Assad government, and American troops in recent weeks have carried out new strikes against ISIS fighters who set up shop in areas previously controlled by Mr. Assad’s forces and their Russian allies.

With an untested rebel force now governing in Damascus, the door may be open for neighboring Turkey to take aim at Kurdish rebels who have been key U.S. partners for the past decade in the war against ISIS.

Turkey, under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, considers elements of that Kurdish alliance to be terrorists looking to link up with Turkish-based Kurdish separatist forces. 

Add to the mix the high likelihood that President-elect Donald Trump will lessen, not expand, the American military footprint in Syria and some specialists say there are serious warning signs on the horizon.

“We’re going to see a lot more Islamic State and copycat attacks,” said former Defense Department official Michael Rubin, now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “The Islamic State is on the rebound, and tens of thousands of its militants might soon go free if Turkey or their proxies overwhelm the camp where Kurds keep them under guard in northeastern Syria. Trump may believe dictators bring stability and so give a free pass to Erdogan to do what he wants with the Kurds, but abandoning America’s top allies in Syria will have a price that Americans will pay on the home front.”

“If ISIS goes free in Syria, don’t expect them to remain there,” Mr. Rubin told The Washington Times. “It would just be a matter of time until they began crossing the southern border or, for that matter, the northern border with Canada.”

The Soufan Center, a security think tank, wrote in a recent analysis that the chaotic conditions in Syria are fertile ground for a new burst of activity by a revitalized  Islamic State.

“The current environment in Syria is tailor-made for ISIS to exploit in an effort to help facilitate its comeback and resurgence, not just in the country but across the region,” the analysis read in part. ” …  Looking at openly available and unclassified data, ISIS attacks in Syria alone tripled from last year, hovering around 700 for 2024. They have also improved in sophistication, increased in lethality, and become more dispersed geographically.”

A dangerous moment 

In New Orleans, Jabbar carried an Islamic State flag in his vehicle during his attack, authorities said. That incident joins a host of other terror incidents over the past decade in which attackers said they acted on behalf of the Islamic State, including the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, a New York City subway bombing in 2017, a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, in 2015, and others. 

The facts suggest there are already dozens, perhaps hundreds, of other individuals in the U.S. right now willing and able to carry out similar attacks. Last October, a House Homeland Security Committee found more than 50 cases since April 2021 in which individuals in the U.S. were charged with attempting to provide material support to terror groups, including the Islamic State, or other terror-related offenses.

Connecting with those individuals, or inspiring new would-be radicals and coaching them on how to carry out terrorist attacks in America, would be far easier for Islamic State officials who feel relatively safe to set up bases of operations. And that danger is most immediate in Syria, where the Islamic State retains a significant fighting force and still has some elements of the deep-rooted infrastructure it established a decade ago during the height of its caliphate across Syria and neighboring Iraq.

Even Russia, hardly a U.S. ally on any major foreign policy or national security issue, is concerned that a power vacuum in Syria will lead to an ISIS revival.

“There are real risks of ISIS resurgence, along with other extremist groups that were previously active in Syria before their apparent dissolution,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said Friday, according to regional media.

Long before the collapse of the Assad regime, Pentagon officials were warning that the conditions for an Islamic State resurgence were forming. In July, U.S. Central Command said that ISIS carried out at least 153 attacks in Iraq and Syria over just the first half of 2024.

“At this rate, ISIS is on pace to more than double the total number of attacks they claimed in 2023. The increase in attacks indicates ISIS is attempting to reconstitute following several years of decreased capability,” CENTCOM said at the time.

Since then, it’s become clear that the U.S. may need to ramp its operations, at least temporarily, to keep a lid on the group. Last month, CENTCOM said it carried out an airstrike in Dayr az Zawr Province that killed two Islamic State operatives and wounded another. The airstrike also destroyed a truckload of weapons, CENTCOM said.

Those ISIS operatives seem to have exploited the political instability inside the war-torn country.

“This strike occurred in an area formerly controlled by the Syrian regime and Russians,” CENTCOM said.

“This airstrike is part of CENTCOM’s ongoing commitment, along with partners in the region, to disrupt and degrade efforts by terrorists to plan, organize, and conduct attacks against civilians and military personnel from the U.S., our allies, and our partners throughout the region and beyond,” CENTCOM said in its statement.

Politically, however, U.S. priorities may be shifting. Mr. Trump during his first term tried to pull all American troops out of Syria, though he was ultimately convinced by influential Republican lawmakers and military officials to keep a small detachment there.

This time around, he seems more determined to execute a full withdrawal.

“The United States should have nothing to do with it,” Mr. Trump said in a social media post just after the fall of the Assad government. “This is not our fight. Let it play out. Do not get involved!”