A Terrorism Resurgence

The killing of 14 people on New Year’s Day in New Orleans was the latest sign of a resurgence in radical Islamist terrorism. Some of the attacks — like the one last week — seem to have been merely inspired by ISIS, the network of groups that are offshoots of Al Qaeda. In other cases, ISIS groups played an active role in the planning.

In today’s newsletter, we’ll detail the scope of the recent terrorism and explain the main reasons for ISIS’s resurgence.

A catalog of violence

The list of attacks and plots either inspired or aided by ISIS over the past five years is longer than many people may realize. It includes:

• Several attacks in France, including the beheading of a teacher in 2020, the fatal knifing of three people in a church in Nice in 2020 and the killing of a teacher in the small city of Arras in 2023.

• Attacks in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Niger, Pakistan and Syria that together have killed hundreds of people.

Why now

ISIS, also known as the Islamic State, began in Iraq two decades ago during the U.S. war there. It once controlled a large piece of territory in Iraq and Syria, but the U.S., under the Trump administration, largely defeated ISIS there.

Today, it is a loose network of chapters with a shared fundamentalist Sunni Muslim ideology. Its sympathizers have attacked Shiite Muslims, in Iran and elsewhere, as well as Christians and Jews. ISIS claims authority over all Muslims and has sometimes clashed with other extremist Sunni groups, including the Taliban.

There are at least four reasons for the recent resurgence.

First, recent coups in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger have left a power vacuum in the Sahel region of West Africa. “The breakdown in governance in the Sahel has led to turmoil and insecurity that’s created space for bad actors including ISIS and Al Qaeda,” our colleague Eric Schmitt said. (We recommend this story by Eric and Ruth Maclean.)

Second, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 reduced the pressure on an ISIS chapter there known as ISIS-K, and it has since expanded beyond Afghanistan. ISIS-K was behind the Iran bombing, the Moscow concert attack and the Taylor Swift plot.