Law enforcement is currently reviewing a series of videos allegedly made by the suspect, 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar of Texas, in the New Orleans attack, including where he is heard saying he joined ISIS, according to multiple officials briefed on the investigation.
The investigation comes as current and former US officials have publicly warned in recent months about ISIS recruitment efforts and that the US is at risk from terror attacks by so-called “lone wolf” actors and small groups as the violence in Gaza has continued to dominate international news coverage since October 7, 2023.
“We continue to be concerned about individuals or small groups drawing twisted inspiration from the events in the Middle East to carry out attacks here at home,” FBI director Chris Wray said during a speech in April.
Former acting CIA Director Michael Morell co-wrote a widely circulated piece in Foreign Affairs over the summer warning that terrorism warning lights are “blinking red,” echoing a similar warning by Wray, who said he sees “blinking lights everywhere I turn.”
“The combination of stated intentions of terrorist groups, growing capabilities they have demonstrated in recent successful and failed attacks around the world, and the fact that several serious plots in the United States have been foiled, point us to an uncomfortable but unavoidable conclusion,” Morell wrote in the piece co-authored with Graham Allison. “Put simply, the United States faces a serious threat of a terrorist attack in the months ahead.”
US officials have been particularly alarmed by propaganda and recruitment efforts by the Afghanistan-based branch of ISIS, ISIS-K, especially since the US withdrawal from Afghanistan has left the government with poorer intelligence-gathering capabilities in that country.
While officials believe that ISIS-K mainly tries to radicalize and inspire attackers rather than train and field operatives, the group’s rise to prominence is a relatively new phenomenon. That means that there is much that US counterterrorism analysts don’t know about its strategy, recruitment efforts and operational tactics.
US officials and analysts who closely track Islamist terror groups do know that ISIS-K has dramatically ramped up its online propaganda machine. Rather than training and deploying fighters — as al Qaeda did in the 9/11 attacks, for example — ISIS-K has instead focused on radicalizing vulnerable populations.