New Orleans attack came as officials warned of growing threat of international-inspired terrorism
WASHINGTON — After Hamas launched the deadly assault on Israel that triggered retaliatory airstrikes on Gaza, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray said he feared the Middle East violence could embolden individuals or groups to carry out attacks inside the United States.
Months later, after extremists with the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate killed more than 140 people at a Russian concert hall, Wray sounded the alarm about the potential for a similar coordinated attack closer to home.
Following these months of warnings about a resurgent terrorism threat, a U.S. Army veteran inspired by Islamic State slammed a pickup truck into crowds celebrating New Year’s Day in New Orleans.
At its height, the group controlled a huge swath of Mideast territory and ruled over millions. Today, its brutal ideology still powers offshoots and inspires “lone wolves.”
But the culprit did not coordinate with international operatives, nor was he part of any broader plot. Instead, he embodied a long-standing concern that snapped into focus in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and never evaporated: the threat from homegrown extremists who radicalize on their own before committing mass violence in the name of foreign groups.
“I have never seen the threat landscape this worrying, not just from a counterterrorism perspective but from state-sponsored threats,” said Christopher Costa, a former career intelligence officer and senior director for counterterrorism at the White House National Security Council in the first Trump administration.
He said the “grab bag of grievances” that may have driven 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar to act — he had multiple divorces and financial pressures and noted in a video posted before the rampage that he thought of killing his family — was consistent with the profile of other attackers. And it coincided with a climate of global instability and upheaval, including the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks that launched the war in Gaza and the dramatic overthrow of Syrian President Bashar Assad last month.
Officials have not yet released the names of the 15 people killed, but their families and friends have started sharing their stories.
“You pick the grievance, and then you’ll find the ideology to act on it,” Costa said. “Now it includes Oct. 7, it includes IS” — an acronym for Islamic State — “and why IS is so important right now is because it is resurging as a result of what IS could perceive as a victory in Syria.”
The New Orleans attack that killed 14 is thought to be the deadliest Islamic State-inspired assault on U.S. soil since a 2016 massacre of 49 people inside the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., by a gunman who professed allegiance to the group’s then-leader, Abu Bakr Baghdadi. That shooting occurred at a time when the FBI was racing to disrupt a surge in plots by “lone wolves” who were drawn to act by Islamic State propaganda or to travel to the group’s self-declared caliphate in Syria and Iraq.
Omar Mateen increasingly sought out Islamic State videos and other radical Islamist propaganda in the months leading up to his shooting rampage at an Orlando, Fla., gay nightclub Sunday, investigators have found.
The threat never abated, as evidenced by the FBI’s October arrest of an Afghan man in Oklahoma who authorities say was inspired by Islamic State to plot an election day attack.
But more brazen and coordinated efforts originating overseas have drawn greater public attention recently, such as Iranian assassination plots targeting public officials, including Donald Trump during his presidential campaign. Add to the mix the turmoil in the Middle East, which has prompted demonstrations in the U.S., the 2021 collapse of the Afghan government that gave rise to Taliban leadership, and concerns about those with Islamic State ties entering the U.S. through the southern border.
The swirl of concerns led Wray to tell the Associated Press in August that he was “hard-pressed to think of a time in my career where so many different kinds of threats are all elevated at once.”
That such a deadly assault in New Orleans was carried out by a lone actor without any direction from overseas underscores the volatile and unpredictable nature of the terrorism threat as well as the challenges in stopping violence from such individuals.
“It’s a very, very difficult law enforcement challenge, much more difficult than dealing with someone who may have had active communications with overseas actors, for example, or having a distinct online profile in which they were consuming and participating in extremist activity in the online space,” said Nicholas Rasmussen, the counterterrorism coordinator for the Department of Homeland Security.
“If you don’t have that,” he added, “then you are very much reliant on that bystander phenomenon.”
There’s no indication that Jabbar, who was fatally shot in a gunfight with police, was ever on law enforcement’s radar before the attack. FBI investigators, however, have turned up significant signs of planning, including suspected bomb-making materials in his short-term New Orleans rental property and his Houston home, the FBI said in a statement Friday.
President-elect Donald Trump turns to a fierce loyalist to upend America’s premier law enforcement agency.
Though officials say he wasn’t aided by conspirators, Jabbar’s method — ramming a truck into bystanders — is a favored option for Islamic State followers, and a pro-Islamic State media unit on Monday encouraged attacks at New Year’s Eve celebrations in the U.S. and other countries, according to an intelligence bulletin from the FBI and Homeland Security seen by the AP.
The terrorism threat will be inherited in just over two weeks by Trump and an FBI that’s bracing for a dramatic leadership change with the nomination of Kash Patel as its director. Patel has long been skeptical of the FBI’s use of its national security powers and has spoken of breaking off the bureau’s “intel shops” from the rest of its crime-fighting activities.
Killings, including a notorious massacre, in a Syrian suburb left residents wanting revenge. Then they heard a militia leader was going to be hanged.
There’s no question that the turmoil in Syria — and what it could mean for the Islamic State group’s ability to reconstitute and inspire supporters in the West — is a major national security wild card.
Assad’s ouster and the arrival of the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, as Syria’s main power broker have been met with degrees of relief but also alarm. Apart from HTS’ past affiliation with Al Qaeda, the collapse of Assad’s military has raised fears of a power vacuum that many believe Islamic State will seek to exploit.
Assad’s departure also has opened a window for Turkey to expand operations against Kurdish fighters in northern Syria that it considers terrorists. The Syrian Defense Forces have been key U.S. allies in the fight against Islamic State and operate detention camps for thousands of captured foreign fighters.
U.S. and European officials are concerned that intensified Turkish attacks against the Syrian Defense Forces may contribute to a potential Islamic State resurgence.
None of that conflict made a New Year’s Day attack on U.S. soil by someone claiming inspiration from Islamic State easily predictable, especially since such violence is far rarer than in the Middle East or Europe, said Natana DeLong-Bas, a professor of theology and Islamic Studies at Boston College.
Even so, she noted, “any idiot” can rent a vehicle.
Tucker writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Rebecca Santana and Matthew Lee in Washington and Jim Mustian in Black Mountain, N.C., contributed to this report.
More to Read
Sign up for Essential California
The most important California stories and recommendations in your inbox every morning.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
