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In the early morning hours of New Year’s Day, a 42-year-old U.S. Army veteran named Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove through a crowd of revelers in the French Quarter of New Orleans, killing at least 14 and injuring dozens more. Jabbar had an Islamic State flag on the rented vehicle and reportedly recorded a video pledging his allegiance to the jihadi group.
The FBI is likely conducting an assessment of Jabbar’s electronics to see what the digital forensics reveal: what kind of Islamic State propaganda was he imbibing; how frequently was he reading Islamic State posts; did he download guides to make improvised explosive devices, or IEDs; which social media platforms did he visit; and was he in touch with any actual Islamic State operatives who may have served as a cyber-coach or virtual entrepreneur in the attack.
In the early morning hours of New Year’s Day, a 42-year-old U.S. Army veteran named Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove through a crowd of revelers in the French Quarter of New Orleans, killing at least 14 and injuring dozens more. Jabbar had an Islamic State flag on the rented vehicle and reportedly recorded a video pledging his allegiance to the jihadi group.
The FBI is likely conducting an assessment of Jabbar’s electronics to see what the digital forensics reveal: what kind of Islamic State propaganda was he imbibing; how frequently was he reading Islamic State posts; did he download guides to make improvised explosive devices, or IEDs; which social media platforms did he visit; and was he in touch with any actual Islamic State operatives who may have served as a cyber-coach or virtual entrepreneur in the attack.
In the past year, almost all thwarted and successful Islamic State external operations—meaning attacks outside the perimeter of the group’s various provinces—have been inspired by the group, rather than enabled or directed by it. This is a stunning feat: The Islamic State has effectively leveraged its brand worldwide to inspire violence and carnage far away from the territories it controls, without even extending basic support to the attackers.
This underscores the crucial role of technologies such as social media and communication platforms in providing access to radicalizing content, as well as the knowledge and technical know-how necessary to orchestrate attacks. It also implies, however, that many such plots depend on rudimentary, low-tech methods—such as vehicle ramming—that capitalize on the simplicity and brutal effectiveness of forceful tactics.
So, how can these attacks be thwarted, and what are ways to stem the effective franchising of the Islamic State worldwide?
The adoption of advanced technology by terrorists—from IEDs to unmanned aerial vehicles—and the continued, highly successful use of simple attack measures—from vehicle ramming to stabbing attacks—indicate the need for a more nuanced understanding of why terrorists opt for certain technologies to commit attacks over others. In a case from last November, a far-right extremist in the United States planned to attack an energy facility substation with a drone rigged with explosives—a stark contrast with what happened in New Orleans.
Vehicle ramming attacks, requiring little to no planning, have become one of the most successful tactics in Islamic State-inspired terrorism due to a combination of practical and ideological factors. They have been used in attacks inspired and enabled by the group worldwide, including in Barcelona, Berlin, London, New York City, Nice, and Stockholm. Vehicle ramming attacks are more likely to succeed because they are incredibly difficult to detect in the planning phase and are equally hard and resource-intensive to mitigate.
In terms of accessibility, cars are readily available, and through rentals and vehicle-sharing platforms, only limited resources are necessary to conduct such an attack. In what the FBI says is merely a coincidence, the New Orleans attacker and a U.S. Army Special Forces soldier who shot and killed himself before the Tesla Cybertruck he was in exploded on Jan. 1 in Las Vegas both used the peer-to-peer rental app Turo to obtain their vehicles.
Additionally, the barrier to entry is low and only requires a driver’s license. The symbolic aspect of vehicle ramming attacks is also important: An everyday utility object can cause mass carnage at any moment, with almost no preparation necessary. These attacks are not unique to jihadi groups. A far-right extremist used a vehicle during the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, to ram into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one. Just weeks ago, a Saudi national living in Germany, motivated by a strange brew of anti-Islamic and far-right ideas, used a car to attack a Christmas market southwest of Berlin.
The Islamic State has long relied on inspiring its supporters to conduct vehicle attacks, following an explicit admonition to do so by its former No. 2, Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, who once exhorted Islamic State supporters to conduct attacks against Westerners with any means at their disposal. “Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him,” Adnani urged more than a decade ago. These brute-force tactics remain highly successful and hard to detect in the planning stages.
Counterterrorism can be a thankless profession. When plots are disrupted or terrorist cells rolled up, it may make the news cycle momentarily, but few people give much thought to what could have been if an attack had succeeded. And the FBI, CIA, and other agencies focused on counterterrorism have a legitimately impressive record in the generational struggle against groups such as al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and their various affiliates, franchises, and regional branches.
But as the Irish Republican Army stated publicly after nearly killing British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1984, “We only have to be lucky once. You have to be lucky always.” It also means that counterterrorism authorities need to allocate resources where they believe the threat is the greatest, which sometimes leads them to become fixated on the “bright, shiny object” or the potential black swan event. This means a great deal of focus on terrorists using drones for attacks or attempting to deploy chemical or biological weapons. But the more quotidian attacks, like that in New Orleans, can still be highly lethal and nearly impossible to deter or defend against.
Constructing steel bollards or other objects that help harden soft targets is one method used by counterterrorism practitioners to secure public event spaces. In New Orleans, the bollard system was being repaired in preparation for next month’s Super Bowl. But even this shows that our societies are always adapting or responding to terrorism, even as our politicians like to trot out the fallacy that altering our lives in any way is “letting the terrorists win.” Still removing one’s shoes in the security line at the airport more than two decades after the infamous shoe bomber attack is a clear example of this. On the contrary, hardening soft targets, with either protective barriers or an increased police presence, is merely a recognition that the threat is real and, as a society, we intend to stand up against it.
There is no silver bullet solution to managing the threat posed by terrorism. After all, it is a tactic and as such cannot be defeated in the traditional sense, as if it were an army or a nation-state. Sound counterterrorism means kinetic measures such as drone strikes and special operations raids but also a comprehensive approach to dealing with root causes and grievances, whether those are socioeconomic, religious, ethnonationalist, or otherwise. In many ways, the Islamic State’s model of outsourcing its terrorism in the West to lone actors with a litany of grievances is the group’s realization of its long-sought playbook. It also makes focusing on root causes more important. In the case of Jabbar, reporting suggests that he struggled, like many others, with reintegrating into civilian life after leaving the military.
Counterterrorism in the modern age must be viewed through a broad, multifaceted lens, addressing both high-tech and low-tech threats in tandem. While the proliferation of advanced technologies—such as drones, encrypted communications, and bombs—requires a sophisticated and coordinated response, we must not overlook the enduring threat posed by more primitive methods such as vehicle ramming attacks and stabbings. Consequently, a comprehensive counterterrorism strategy means dismantling the technological infrastructure that enables terrorist groups to communicate and operate across borders while simultaneously fortifying the physical and societal barriers that mitigate the risk of simpler, brute-force tactics.
Only through a balanced approach that spans the full spectrum of technology used in attacks can we ensure the safety and resilience of our communities against the ever-evolving, blinking-red landscape of terrorism. As the Islamic State ramps up its operations overseas, taking advantage of power vacuums from Syria to Somalia, it will also accelerate its propaganda and media operations, leading to more of its followers seeking to conduct attacks in its name.
The Islamic State may have fallen off the front page of the newspaper, overshadowed by Russia’s war in Ukraine and Israel’s response to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack, but it remains stubbornly resilient and will prove to be a day-one issue for the Trump administration.