New Orleans attack a clear warning ISIS still threatens

The horrifying New Year’s Day terrorist attack in New Orleans that killed 15 people and injured at least 30 shows how misplaced the optimism was when, in March 2019, Islamic State was “defeated” and lost its territorial “caliphate”, it was believed that would be the end of it. Disclosure by the FBI that an Islamic State black flag, symbol of the evil beheadings that came to epitomise its barbaric rule, was found with the truck used by 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a US-born citizen and army veteran from Texas, to plough into early morning revellers on Bourbon Street in the city’s French Quarter, is a grim reminder of the ongoing threat Islamic State poses to the entire world. No country, even Australia, should assume it is immune to the heightened terrorist threat.

FBI director Christopher Wray, who will leave the day Donald Trump is sworn in on January 20, had been warning for months that his agency was on high alert for another attack. “We’ve seen the threat from foreign terrorists rise to a whole ’nother level since the October 7, 2023 (Hamas terrorist) massacre of Jews in Israel,” Mr Wray said recently. “Looking back over my career in law enforcement, I’d be hard pressed to think of a time where there were so many threats to our public safety and national security … elevated all at once,” he added. “But that is the case today.” No less presciently, the Biden administration’s outgoing National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan, warned only last week that the downfall of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria could trigger an Islamic State “comeback”. ISIS, Mr Sullivan said, “loves vacuums (and) what we see in Syria now are areas that are basically ungoverned because of the fall of the Assad regime”.

The consequence of that, as The Times reported on Thursday, is that in volatile northeastern Syria, pro-Western Kurdish groups have already detained “thousands” of Islamic State fighters. While that may not suggest an immediate, direct link to the appalling massacre of the New Orleans pedestrians, it does indicate that even before the collapse of the Assad regime there was increasing alarm about the hard core of Islamic State fighters that remained active – funded by supporters from around the world – at the heart of the former “caliphate”, which straddled Syria and Iraq.

Domestic acts of terrorism inspired from abroad, as The Wall Street Journal pointed out, are not uncommon. But the clearest message of the New Orleans carnage is that the forces of Islamic radicalism in the US and elsewhere did not die with the assumed destruction of the caliphate. They are still around, still looking for security weaknesses to exploit for mass murder in the name of violent Islamist extremism, and no country is safe from foreign-influenced or foreign-planned attacks. The context of the New Orleans attack, a little more than a year after the mass slaughter of Jews by Hamas, leaves no doubt Islamist terrorism is on the march and that it is certain to present a major challenge to the new Trump White House.

In the election campaign, Donald Trump often referred to Islamic State in the past tense. “We obliterated 100 per cent of the ISIS caliphate,” he said in his acceptance speech to the Republican convention in August. That may have been true then, but signs that Islamic State is regrouping beyond the vast swathes of countries across Africa and Asia, where it has been operating at an increasingly intense – and successful – level since the caliphate collapsed, suggest a need for a policy rethink.

Mr Trump’s insistence, as the Assad regime collapsed last month, that the US should keep out of the crisis, despite the presence of US troops stationed in the country, was understandable given that his election triumph included a commitment to keep America out of foreign wars. But if Islamic State really is making a comeback, Mr Trump would be wise to reconsider his attitude to both Syria and Iraq, the other half of the ISIS caliphate, where the US military already is in the process of drawing down 2500 troops.

Mr Trump’s initial response to the New Orleans attack was to express concern about the US’s porous border with Mexico, blaming Joe Biden for what he said was the outgoing President’s “parting gift to America – migrant terrorists”. In this case the perpetrator of the attack was not a migrant but that does not mean the US and other countries should not be alert to the threat posed by radical ideologues from all sources, from lone-wolf domestic actors to sleeper cells acting in a more co-ordinated or sophisticated fashion.

There is much still to be ascertained about the latest attack and whether there was a larger conspiracy underpinning it. More information will come to light as the investigation continues. But what is already clear is that, in the context of events in Syria and Iraq, and the power vacuum that has been created, conditions exist for a major new terrorist challenge that demands strong, decisive leadership from the civilised world – the sort of leadership in the face of terrorism that Israel has demonstrated to the world since Hamas’s October 7 slaughter of 1200 Jews.

The indications of a resurgent Islamic State, with all the horror that would bring, demand no less.