New Orleans Terror Attack: An Overview of ISIS Support in America

By Seamus Hughes
NCITE Senior Research Faculty and Policy Associate

Around 3 a.m. on New Year’s Day, a man drove a pickup truck through crowds of people on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing 14 individuals and injuring 35 others. After crashing his vehicle, authorities say he began shooting, resulting in injuries to two police officers and the death of the alleged assailant. Law enforcement is also investigating the potential for explosive devices in the truck.

Authorities on Wednesday have identified the suspect as Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar. According to the FBI, Jabbar had an ISIS flag on the vehicle he was driving, a rental. The investigation is ongoing. More details will undoubtedly shake out in the coming hours and days. To put the attack in a larger context, below is a quick overview of the history of ISIS support in the United States.

According to a recent NCITE review of criminal cases since 2014, more than 250 individuals have been charged with ISIS-related activities. Most of these charges were federal, but not always. The vast majority of this group have been U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents. The accused tend to be male. They also generally tend to be young, ranging in age from 15 to 62, but most are considerably younger than this 42-year-old suspect. Most have pleaded guilty before trial, while a few dozen were found guilty by a jury of their peers. The Justice Department has only lost one terrorism prosecution.

According to news reports, Jabbar is a former U.S. Army member. This would not be totally unusual – there have been past examples of ISIS-supporting individuals who have U.S. armed services experience, both active duty and retired. Though a history of military service is not an indicator of potential radicalization, nor are former military members significantly more likely to join foreign terrorist groups than the general public.

All told, the number of ISIS supporters in the U.S. is statistically small, though actions of the few have had an outsized effect on public perception and government policy. For the last decade, the FBI has consistently said in public remarks that it has more than 1,000 active ISIS investigations in all 50 states. As FBI Director Christopher Wray noted in 2021 congressional testimony, “...the [number of] homegrown violent extremists, has been humming along fairly consistently at about 1,000 investigations – sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less – over the last few years.”

“Homegrown violent extremist” is the internal naming bucket the FBI uses for individuals inspired by foreign terrorist organizations such as ISIS.

There is no indication either way if the attacker was on law enforcement’s radar prior to today. However, of past ISIS attacks and attempted plots in the United States, there are few, if any, in which the perpetrator didn’t have a prior engagement with or wasn’t a prior subject of investigation by law enforcement. Some of that is a reflection of a post-Sept. 11 world where national security tripwires are comprehensive enough to trigger a law enforcement review of an individual but key civil rights and civil liberties structures understandably restrict the FBI’s ability to keep a case open indefinitely without an illegal action committed. Other deadly attacks by terrorists under FBI investigation were examples of simply missing key radicalization signs.

Vehicle ramming is a recurring terrorism tactic, particularly with ISIS but not exclusively limited to one ideological bent.

New Year’s Day isn’t a particularly important date in American jihadist circles, although there was a past foreign terrorist-inspired attack during New Year’s Eve celebrations. When attacks occur on major holidays, be it Christmas or New Year’s, they tend to be less about the date itself and more about the guarantee of significant media and public interest and large gatherings of potential victims, thus getting their political message of violence out further to the masses.

While the domestic terrorism threat has taken a lion’s share of the focus by policymakers in recent years, ISIS support and prosecutions in America have remained steady. Excluding 2014-2016 at the height of ISIS, which saw more than 60 arrests a year, typically, in America, there will be about a dozen ISIS-related federal arrests a year. That trend continued in 2024, including a Texas man who allegedly worked on graphic support for the terrorist group, a Maryland teenager who reportedly wanted to travel to Somalia to join ISIS, and two Oklahoma men arrested for an election day plot.

If you’re interested in learning more about the history of ISIS in America, my colleagues and I wrote a critically acclaimed book about it. As part of our research, we reviewed tens of thousands of court records, interviewed Americans who traveled to Syria to join ISIS, family members of the accused, FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force agents, national security prosecutors, and defense attorneys.

More information on the terror attack will come out shortly, as investigators rush to file search warrants for houses and electronics, interview friends and family, and retrace the alleged assailant’s steps leading up to that early morning deadly attack. The suspect is dead but the multi-agency nationwide investigation is just starting.