The New Orleans attack shows that ISIS hasn’t gone away. It’s changed.
“The attacker, Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, a 42-year-old Army veteran from Texas, rammed a truck into Bourbon Street before he was killed in a shootout with police. Jabbar was flying an ISIS flag from his vehicle and posted videos on Facebook shortly before the attack, pledging support to the group.
In a briefing on Thursday, FBI Deputy Assistant Director Christopher Raia described Jabbar as “100 percent inspired by ISIS.” Raia said that Jabbar, who had also planted two explosive devices on Bourbon Street that never went off, claimed he had joined ISIS before last summer. In his videos, Jabbar said he had originally planned to attack his relatives and friends — he had recently gone through a divorce — but worried that media coverage would not focus on what he called the “war between the believers and disbelievers.” Authorities are also investigating whether there is any link between the attack and a truck bombing that took place outside the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas on the same day, though for now there does not appear to be.
Using trucks and vans to ram into crowds has been a staple of deadly ISIS-linked attacks for years, from Nice, France, to Barcelona, to Berlin, to Stockholm. New Orleans is likely the biggest ISIS-inspired attack on US soil since 2016, when gunman Omar Mateen killed 49 people at Pulse, an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Orlando, Florida. The last significant ISIS-inspired attack in the US was in 2017, when Sayfullo Saipov drove a truck onto Manhattan’s West Side Highway, killing eight people.
ISIS-linked violence is still common around the world — there was a major suicide attack on a military base in Somalia just this week. The group’s Afghanistan-based affiliate, ISIS-K, has been particularly ambitious and global in its activities. It carried out an attack on Moscow’s Crocus theater that killed more than 130 people last March, as well as the suicide bombings that killed nearly 100 people in Tehran in January 2024. In August, authorities foiled a “quite advanced” ISIS-K plot to attack a Taylor Swift concert in Austria.
The fact that there hadn’t been any recent ISIS-inspired attacks in the US in recent years may not be from lack of trying. Aaron Y. Zelin, who researches and tracks jihadist groups at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, notes that there were five arrests for ISIS-related plots in the US in 2024, including attempts to “target churches in Idaho, LGBTQ ‘establishments’ in Philadelphia, Jewish centers/synagogues in New York City, election day voting locations in Oklahoma City, and a Pride parade in Phoenix.” That’s up from zero arrests of this type in 2023.
The fact that one of the group’s self-acknowledged acolytes has now succeeded to deadly and tragic effect raises some tough questions about whether ISIS is primed for a resurgence, and what it actually means to be “ISIS-affiliated” today.”
https://www.vox.com/world-politics/393110/new-orleans-isis-jabbar