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The deadly attack in New Orleans on New Year’s Day, which authorities say was carried out by a man radicalized by ISIS, is raising fears of more attacks and raising questions about how they will affect the president-elect’s isolationist tendencies Trump in the war on terror.
Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, a retired US Army veteran from Texas who worked at accounting firm Deloitte, killed 14 people after plowing a truck down busy Bourbon Street, marking the first inspired attack by ISIS on American soil since 2017. Jabbar was shot. and killed by the police.
ISIS has been severely degraded by a US-led campaign in Iraq and Syria, but the terror group has rebounded in recent years and claimed responsibility for several deadly attacks around the world in 2024.
US officials argue that maintaining a presence in Iraq and Syria is vital to reducing the threat from ISIS, but Trump has signaled that he could reduce troops in the Middle East. Last month, the new president called for a no-nonsense approach to Syria, a country he tried to withdraw from in his first term, following the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime in Damascus.
Aaron Zelin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said ISIS has recently shown a “higher pace” of attacks globally and warned of a further resurgence if Trump dramatically downplayed the US presence in the Middle East.
“It would be a monumental mistake, on par with the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, which provided the space for the Islamic State to come back, and that would be under their control,” he said, referring to se to the US withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, only to return again in 2014 to fight ISIS.
A spokesman for Trump’s transition team did not respond to a request for comment on how the incoming president will handle ISIS threats and manage the Middle East.
Under President Biden, the US has maintained its focus on degrading ISIS. Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh told reporters Friday that ISIS “remains a threat,” even if it’s not at the level it was a decade ago.
“ISIS retains the capabilities, as we’ve seen in Iraq and Syria, and that’s why we have our forces in both countries to make sure that ISIS can never reconstitute, re-emerge or seek what it was,” he said. .
ISIS rose to power in 2014 but was largely defeated by the US and its allies within five years, losing much of its territory in Iraq and northeastern Syria.
The US has roughly 2,500 troops in Iraq and about 900 permanent boots on the ground in Syria, although the Pentagon recently announced that a temporary detachment has brought the number to about 2,000.
Although Trump, who takes office on January 20, has yet to make an explicit decision to withdraw troops from Syria, he called in December to stay out of Syrian affairs after rebel groups seized control of the country . In his first term, Trump tried to withdraw troops but only succeeded in reducing the numbers.
“If there are trends within Trump’s foreign policy to move toward isolationism, a resurgent ISIS is likely to put that pause, and I hope they do,” said Colin Clarke, the group’s director of research. Soufan
“I’m not talking about deploying (more) ground troops to the Middle East, but I think staying aggressive in terms of attacking the Islamic State abroad is imperative, at the very least,” he added.
“That means going after command and control units, going after high-value targets and key leaders, and keeping them off balance, because when the group is able to take advantage of the momentum, we’re going to see more of what we see.”
Iraq may be a more difficult scenario for Trump to manage. Last year, Washington and Baghdad announced an agreement to reduce the US presence by 2026, although it is not clear by how much.
Zelin of the Washington Institute urged Trump to negotiate with Baghdad to ensure there are at least some US forces in the country.
“The problem is that Iraq and Syria share borders. So even if ISIS is weak in Iraq, if ISIS goes back to Syria, it can bring resources back to Iraq,” he said. “The future of Iraqi security is equally tied to the future of Syrian security. So you can’t separate one from the other.”
US forces regularly conduct airstrikes and operations against ISIS, including a December mission that killed ISIS leader Abu Yusif aka Mahmud.
Even so, ISIS-K, the terrorist group’s branch in Afghanistan, has re-emerged following the US withdrawal from the nation in 2021. ISIS-K has been responsible for attacks last year that killed hundreds of Iran, Turkey and Russia.
In the West, ISIS was responsible for knife attacks last year that killed three people in Germany and wounded a man in Switzerland. An ISIS-inspired plot for a mass attack at an August Taylor Swift concert in Austria was foiled.
Jason Blazakis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies who examines violent extremism, said that despite losing territory, ISIS has managed to maintain an online presence, fueling its propaganda machine that can radicalize people to carry out deadly attacks.
“While ISIS has degraded in real-world spaces like Syria, they still have a presence in various places where they can access a computer and social media to send propaganda,” he said. “So even though they’ve lost territory in some places, it hardly matters, as long as an ISIS propagandist has access to a computer.”
Attacks also have a way of spreading propaganda, inspiring copycat attacks. The New Orleans attack has similarities to the 2017 truck attack in New York City that killed eight people, also carried out by a man inspired by ISIS.
White House national security spokesman John Kirby said at a briefing Friday that federal authorities are monitoring additional threats “very, very closely and will continue to do so.”
But Blazakis said the US should invest more resources in counter-terrorism operations.
“We’re just not doing the same kind of collection against these threats that we did five years ago,” he said, calling for Trump to put more resources into the counterterrorism space. “Isolationism will not be a successful recipe for countering the rise of ISIS and Al Qaeda.
“It doesn’t mean the United States has to put thousands of troops on the ground in places like Syria to do better, but we can invest to try to build the capacity of countries to fight ISIS in their own backyards, and that could send small cadres of individuals to help these governments do this,” he added.
ISIS generally recruits from conflict-ridden and volatile regions of the world, including nations such as Tajikistan, which has many migrants moving to other countries.
But the terrorist group is trying to radicalize more people directly in the West and in 2022 launched an English-language project. magazine called Voice of Khorasanwhich is broadcast online.
Fears are also growing that ISIS is looking to inspire more sophisticated attacksincluding calls to use drones and other new technologies.
But there are also signs that ISIS propaganda may be losing its effect.
Antoine Baudon, business manager and deputy director of the International Counter-Terrorism Center, said recent ISIS attacks have received less enthusiasm and praise because of declining interest in the ideology and the ‘self-sacrifice, and the reduction of the terrorist group’s power to reward. supporters
“We’re seeing that these attacks aren’t resonating as much as they used to, which tends to show that it’s becoming more isolated,” he said. “They don’t see the benefits. But that doesn’t mean people don’t still believe it.”
