TERRORISM IN AMERICA: THE BOURBON STREET ATTACK WAS PART OF A NEW PATTERN / THE ECONOMIST

Terrorism in America

The Bourbon Street attack was part of a new pattern

Why some experts fear a resurrection of Islamic State

SHAMSUD-Din Jabbar, a 42-year-old American citizen and military veteran from Texas, had worked as an IT specialist in the army and praised the discipline and planning that it taught him. 

He had also worked in real estate. 

He had a conviction for theft. 

And he had been married twice. 

Why he rammed a rented Ford pickup truck into a crowd of revellers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans in the early hours of January 1st, killing at least 14 and injuring 35, is mysterious and in a sense always will be.

But the FBI is investigating the attack as an act of terrorism: a black Islamic State (IS) flag flew from the bumper of the truck driven by Mr Jabbar. 

President Joe Biden said that security briefings he had received showed Mr Jabbar was inspired by IS and wanted to kill for its cause. 

The fact that he avoided detection suggests a fairly sophisticated conspiracy. 

“This is not a garden-variety attack,” says Colin Clarke of the Soufan Center, a global-security research group. After the crash police killed Mr Jabbar in a shoot-out.

Since the heyday of IS’s so-called caliphate nearly a decade ago, the number of violent plots that Muslim-Americans planned or carried out for revolutionary groups has plummeted, from 94 in 2015 to just three in 2023, according to data collected by Charles Kurzman of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (see chart). 

But if Mr Jabbar was indeed inspired by IS, the New Year’s attack will have been the latest in a string of recent successes for the group—and perhaps its most lethal strike on American soil since the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016.

Essentially, “2024 was IS’s year of resurrection,” says Bruce Hoffman, a counterterrorism scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank. 

On January 3rd 2024 an IS terrorist killed 95 civilians at an Iranian ceremony to commemorate Qasem Soleimani, a top general assassinated by America. 

(IS counts both America and Iran’s Shia theocratic regime as mortal enemies.) 

The memorial bombing was followed by an attack on a Roman Catholic church in Istanbul later that month and another particularly bloody one at a concert in Moscow in March. 

Since last summer, American intelligence services have foiled two big plots: one planned for a Taylor Swift show in Austria and another for election day in Oklahoma City.

Why now? 

Extremist outfits organise in chaotic places and this year has provided a bevy of them. 

After the Assad regime in Syria collapsed last month the Biden administration said it was “clear-eyed about the fact that IS will try to take advantage of any vacuum to reestablish its capability”. 

Grievances over attacks on Muslim civilians also help extremist groups recruit volunteers. The war in Gaza has “reinforced the ideology that the West sees Muslim life as cheap and expendable,” says David Schanzer, a professor at Duke University. 

Terrorism is asymmetric warfare amplified by media; flashy complex attacks are a way for a weakened IS to reassert its relevance.

Analysts who have been tracking terrorism for years see reasons to fret these days—and the New Orleans attack only confirms them. 

Since the end of the Obama administration the government’s focus on counterterrorism has been eclipsed by great-power strategy and competition involving China and Russia, as well as persistent conflict with Iran. 

Mr Trump’s promise to slash federal budgets could further hinder the government’s ability to collect intelligence, carry out operations overseas and stop home-grown terrorist attacks, says Jason Blazakis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute. 

Mr Trump’s MAGA cabinet’s tendency towards isolationism could also give groups like IS and al-Qaeda room to grow abroad, especially if America withdraws Special Forces and local army trainers that have characterised counterterrorism strategy in recent years.

It is probably no coincidence that Mr Jabbar chose to carry out his attack on New Year’s Eve, a night known for drinking and partying, indulgences that are anathema to puritanical Muslim extremists. 

Bourbon Street, the hub of New Orleans’s tourist district, exemplifies that spirit more than most American places. 

As families searched for their loved ones at local hospitals, news of a second deadly attack surfaced: this one in Las Vegas. 

There, a Tesla Cybertruck exploded outside the Trump Hotel, killing the person inside the vehicle. 

The authorities are investigating this, too, as an act of terror. 

Like the car used in New Orleans, the Tesla Cybertruck was rented on Turo, a car-sharing service.  

If IS is involved in that one too, its ability to carry out two near-simultaneous attacks in distant American cities will reinforce the impression that a movement that seemed to have been defeated is once again a threat to take seriously.