Why We Haven’t Seen the Last of Islamic State | Opinion

An Islamic State (ISIS) inspired terrorist conducted a vehicle ramming attack in the early hours of New Year’s Day in New Orleans, killing 15 and leaving dozens more injured. The attacker, a 42-year-old American citizen and former U.S. Army member, recorded a video pledging his allegiance to ISIS and also had an ISIS flag attached to the truck he used in the deadly rampage, the most lethal jihadist attack on U.S. soil since the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016.

The alleged perpetrator, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, was the latest U.S. military veteran to be implicated in a terrorist plot. In November, a 24-year-old Ohio man and U.S. Army private first class was sentenced to 14 years in prison for attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State.

The tactic of vehicle ramming is also straight from the Islamic State’s playbook, a style of attack the group has used before on multiple occasions to kill hundreds of people during attacks in Nice, France; Berlin; New York City; Stockholm; London; and Barcelona, Spain, to name just a few. The simplicity of vehicle ramming, which allows for widespread adaptability, along with easy access to vehicles makes these attacks difficult to prevent and detect.

Despite the loss of its caliphate, ISIS never stopped engineering and influencing attacks and can still inspire attacks in the West. Though investigators are still looking into how Jabbar became radicalized, the proliferation of online content by ISIS and ISIS-sympathizers has only increased radicalization and the threat of future attacks persists. Leading up to the New Year, Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K), ISIS’s Afghan affiliate, was posting propaganda across social media platforms urging its supporters to conduct attacks on Christmas and New Year’s Eve.

Large public gatherings like a New Year’s Eve celebration on Bourbon Street are always going to be attractive targets for terrorist groups, both in terms of symbolism and for the large casualty counts that a successful attack yields. There is no way to prevent all such attacks on soft targets.

There is going to be a lot of focus on security gaps and vulnerabilities in the aftermath of the attack. And while that type of assessment is important, law enforcement and counterterrorism authorities also need to look toward to preventing attacks. With the Islamic State gaining momentum from a recent attack in Somalia and the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, ISIS is going to look to seize this current moment to resurge, which could bring with it a fresh wave of attacks over the course of this year in the West.

Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL), President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for national security advisor, has since spoken about the attack in New Orleans and Trump’s approach to counterterrorism in the United States. Both have preached the closure of the United States’ border as the first line of defense in countering terrorism following the attack, despite the confirmation that Jabbar was a U.S.-born citizen. During his first administration, Trump invoked a travel ban of citizens of several predominately Muslim countries from entering the United States. A border closure can be seen as a more extreme version of his travel ban, both with the same objective of protecting U.S. national security.

However, a study by New America found that as of 2019 “every lethal attacker since 9/11 was either a citizen or permanent resident of the United States at the time of the attack.” Thus, while the focus on foreign threats is relevant, it is not the foremost answer to counterterrorism in the U.S. Rather, the upcoming administration also needs to focus closely on “homegrown violent extremists” that are becoming radicalized while already present in the United States.

The attack in New Orleans should serve as a wake-up call for the incoming administration, law enforcement, and intelligence community that the threat posed by ISIS remains and will grow more dire if the group is able to resurge overseas, amplify its propaganda, and bring new recruits into the organization willing to commit acts of terrorism in its name.

Gabriella Tejeda is a Research Associate at The Soufan Center. Her research focuses on geopolitics and global security issues.

Colin P. Clarke is the director of research at The Soufan Group and the author of After the Caliphate: The Islamic State and the Future Terrorist Diaspora.

The views expressed in this article are the writers’ own.