Welcome Back to the Tens
It didn't take the new year long to remind us that ISIS is still around and never left
Donald Trump has won the presidency. Killings linked to ISIS (The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) are a feature of life. The crypto market is on fire.
Welcome back to 2017-ish.
In 2013, ISIS launched a bloody campaign to establish its own territorial state. In 2014, it declared the creation of the Islamic State, which, at its peak, controlled 40% of Iraq and one-third of Syria. By the end of 2015, the group was responsible for at least 33,000 deaths, according to a University of Maryland study.
Fast forward to December 2017, and the Islamic State had lost 95% of its territory. One month earlier, President Trump announced that anti-ISIS coalition forces had seized ISIS’s seat of power in Raqqa, Syria. “With the liberation of ISIS’s capital and the vast majority of its territory, the end of the ISIS caliphate is in sight,” Trump proclaimed.
In March 2019, the Islamic State lost its last territorial holding. In October 2019, ISIS leader Abu Omar al Baghdadi was killed in a U.S. military raid.
Yet, even after Baghdadi’s demise, ISIS-coordinated and inspired attacks continued to be carried out in nations around the world, resulting in thousands of additional fatalities. According to U.S. Central Command, during the first six months of 2024, ISIS was responsible for 153 attacks in Iraq and Syria alone, which put it on pace to double its 2023 attack total in those countries.
In 2024, ISIS was also responsible for several high-profile killings that made worldwide news. On Jan. 3, 2024, ISIS members detonated multiple explosives at a memorial service in Iran, killing 95 people and injuring almost 300. On Jan. 28, a pair of ISIS-affiliated gunmen fired into a Catholic Church in Istanbul, Turkey during Sunday morning mass, killing one person. On March 22, ISIS operatives carried out an attack with guns and bombs at a concert hall near Moscow, killing 145 people and injuring more than 500. And on Aug. 23, a knife-wielding ISIS supporter began indiscriminately stabbing people at a festival in Solingen, Germany, killing three and injuring eight.
And the year of our Lord 2025 was but a few hours old when it saw its first ISIS-inspired attack, a strike in the most prized target of all for jihadists, the U.S. At 3:15 a.m., a truck with an ISIS flag plowed into dozens of New Year’s revelers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing 14 people and injuring 35. The vehicle also contained an improvised explosive device, and several other IEDs were found in the vicinity, although none of the devices were triggered.
The driver, 42-year-old Texas resident Shamsud Din-Jabbar, posted five videos on social media declaring his allegiance to ISIS prior to ramming his truck into the French Quarter crowd. In one of the videos, he claimed to have joined the terror network in the spring of 2024.
Din-Jabbar’s New Year’s rampage was the first ISIS-inspired attack in the U.S. since 2017, but from 2015 - 2017, these kinds of attacks were a reality that Americans lived with. At least five such strikes happened within our borders in that span, killing 71 people and injuring more than 100:
December 2, 2015: 28-year-old Syed Farook and 29-year-old Tashfeen Malik, a Californian husband and wife, opened fire at a local health department Christmas party, killing 14 people and injuring more than 20. Malik had sworn fealty to ISIS leader Baghdadi on social media. The pair were killed in a shootout with police.
June 12, 2016: Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old Florida man, committed the second deadliest mass shooting in American history at a night club in Orlando, killing 49 and injuring 53. Mateen was killed by police in the course of the massacre, which he committed in the name of ISIS.
Nov. 28, 2016: Ohio State University student Abdul Razak Ali Artan drove a car into a campus crowd and then stabbed several people, injuring or wounding 11, before he was shot and killed by university police. Artan had self-radicalized online via consumption of ISIS propaganda and ranted frequently on social media about U.S. interference in the affairs of the Islamic world.
Oct. 31, 2017: Sayfullo Saipov, 29, a green card holder from Uzbekistan, ran down cyclists and pedestrians on a bike path after driving on it with his truck. He mowed down 19 people on his homicidal joyride, killing eight and injuring 13, including a woman who lost both her legs. The truck contained a document that indicated Saipov’s allegiance to ISIS. In 2023,
Saipov was sentenced to 10 consecutive life terms in prison plus an additional 260 years.
Dec. 11, 2017: Akayed Ullah, 27, a New York resident, partially detonated a pipe bomb in the underground walkway between the Times Square and Port Authority subway stops in Manhattan, and underneath the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Three people were injured, an outcome that could have easily been much worse if the bomb hadn’t partially malfunctioned. In 2021, Ullah was sentenced to life in prison.
Authorities believe Din-Jabbar, who was killed by police during his Bourbon Street slaughter, acted independently. Still, much is unknown about his level of affiliation with ISIS. Did he merely encounter the group’s propaganda online and self-radicalize, or did he actually have any contact with its members?
And what did he mean when he said he joined the organization? Was his “membership” the equivalent of following somebody or something online, or did he travel to an ISIS camp and receive training?
In the meantime, Americans are left to process the return of ISIS to their consciousness (along with the group’s familiar use of moving vehicles as weapons of mass terror). Prior to New Year’s Day, we believed that we had turned the page from the horrors of the 2010s to a new page of horrors in the 2020s (like Covid).
But, the truth is that we never closed the book on ISIS. After the “final defeat” of the last remnant of its physical caliphate, its survivors simply migrated online, regrouped and reorganized.
According to Aaron Zelin, a researcher for The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, ISIS has now reconfigured around approximately a dozen regional centers around the world whose doings are centrally coordinated. The organization also runs a cryptocurrency operation in Somalia, which partly finances its activities. ISIS, which has always been tech-savvy, has also continued to modernize, embracing artificial intelligence and other leading-edge technologies to help it achieve its ends.
Contemporary ISIS terror operations can be divided into three categories, Zelin told “Toronto Star” reporter Allan Woods. “Directed plots” involve strikes where the attackers are directly trained by ISIS, and their assignments are coordinated by ISIS handlers. In “guided attacks,” the perpetrators receive technical consultation and sometimes funding from ISIS.
But, the most common form of ISIS-related terrorism today features assailants who have had no direct contact with the jihadist network and simply became radicalized online and pledged their loyalty to the group on social media. These attacks are also the most challenging to stop.
It’s not clear which category of strike the New Orleans mass murder belongs in. Federal agents are scrutinizing a month-long trip that Din-Jabbar took to Egypt in 2023, where he could have made contact with ISIS agents and been given instructional and material assistance.
Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter how the massacre is classified. Because it happened. Again. Here. And just like that the American psyche has gone screaming back to last decade, when the awareness that terror strikes could happen here and could happen to any of us was constantly in the back of our heads.
As it turns out, the page on terrorism can’t be turned. Some horrors always come back around.
Portions of this post have been inspired by the ideas in my book The Anti-Partisan Manifesto: How Parties and Partisanism Divide America and How to Shut Them Down. Buy the book here. For the time being, it is only available digitally. To read, download the Kindle app to your phone, your iPad or tablet, your Kindle device or your computer.
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