Terrorism in New Orleans and the Threat of a Rebounding ISIS

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, ANCHOR: Well, up next, are we seeing a resurrection of ISIS? That’s what our next guest believes after 2024 saw a boost in activities by the terrorist group. And now, the FBI has confirmed that the suspect in the New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans was inspired by ISIS. Senior Fellow for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security at the Council on Foreign Relations, Bruce Hoffman, joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss the growing terror threat and what could be driving people towards extremist ideas.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Bianna, thanks. Bruce Hoffman, thanks so much for joining us. You know, when we look at the background of this former soldier who launched this attack in New Orleans. We see that he was given a medal for serving in the global war on terrorism. And here we are just a couple of days ago, the FBI is calling him a terrorist. How does this happen? How does this almost 180-degree switch happen?

BRUCE HOFFMAN, SENIOR FELLOW, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS: What we know from Jabbar’s background is he was experiencing, I think what might be charitably called immense frustrations in his life. He had two failed marriages. He was estranged from his children. He appears to have entered into and out of various financial ventures and difficulties. He was a convert to a different religion. It may have been that he found an answer to his life and achieving more in his death than he could have had he lived. And that may be the simplest explanation of what drove him to this particular heinous act of violence.

SREENIVASAN: How did the people around him miss this conversion or just this kind of change in attitude? I mean, now we’re discovering that there were social media posts before this happened.

HOFFMAN: Yes. I don’t know how widely circulated or how widely known the social media posts were. Clearly members of his family had noticed changes, that he had grown his beard long, for example, and seemed to become more devout than he had cut his beard. He started dressing a bit differently. But there were — there was nothing really that would have triggered any assumption that this relation of theirs was going to embark on a terrorist operation that obviously required considerable surveillance because we know now he made two reconnaissance trips to New Orleans and including one last October, where he drove around Bourbon Street wearing the kinds of glasses where you can surreptitiously record footage. So, he obviously had been thinking about this for a long time, but no one seemed to notice that there was really anything out of the ordinary that might have suggested a violent intent.

SREENIVASAN: You know, we’ve seen a number of ISIS attacks decrease over the kind of longer arc, maybe from 2016, 2017. But this last year, we saw an uptick in different parts of the world. What do you think explains that?

HOFFMAN: No terrorist group willingly goes into irrelevance for them. Their stock and trade is violence because that’s how they attract attention to themselves and their causes. Obviously, ISIS was knocked off balance by the defeat of the caliphate, the elimination of its rule over Western Iraq and Eastern Syria, and it’s taken time to regroup and reorganize. And unfortunately, in 2024, as you note, we saw a significant uptick in international ISIS terrorist activities, which was, in essence, a harbinger of an escalation, even in the United States, because now we’ve had one attack and one very serious incident and that was back in October, when an individual in Oklahoma City was apprehended by the FBI plotting to engage in a terrorist attack on the November Election Day.

SREENIVASAN: What — you know, when you think of this, it seems less as a central organization that is calling people to do specific things and it’s almost like it’s enabling others to have their own inspirations.

HOFFMAN: It’s both. And that was what makes ISIS so difficult to understand and for the authorities so difficult to track. On the one hand, you have highly organized, even orchestrated terrorist attacks. The one last March at the Crocus Music Concert Hall in Moscow, where 130 persons were killed is precisely a case of point. But then, as you note, we have an incident such as occurred in New Orleans where at least as of this moment, there’s no evidence that the perpetrator had any contact with ISIS operatives or commanders. And therefore, what we see is ISIS pursuing a parallel track of orchestrating, organizing terrorist attacks, but also encouraging, inspiring, motivating, and animating individuals completely on their own to carry out attacks on behalf of ISIS.

SREENIVASAN: How strong do we think ISIS is today? I mean, I wonder also how kind of geopolitical instability in the Middle East factors into this.

HOFFMAN: Terrorism doesn’t occur in a vacuum, it reflects the tensions in society, the conflicts and other corners of the world, the political polarization in any entity. And in this sense, I think ISIS has been struggling in recent years to reassert itself. And unfortunately, in 2024, there were at least a half dozen, if not attacks, then serious plots that were derailed. And then, of course, the upheaval in Syria and the chaos in Syria. ISIS’s goal was to overthrow the regime of Bashar al-Assad. They failed. Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham succeeded. So, now, for ISIS, they are trying to figure out a way that they could elbow themselves back into the limelight, that they can steal some of that thunder that Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham has acquired from having overthrown the regime. And once again, for ISIS to demonstrate its relevance. And tragically, its violent acts of terrorism that they believe will re-establish its preeminence as the biggest terrorist threat in the globe.

SREENIVASAN: You know, you’ve written before that ISIS really pioneered kind of the use of social media. Explain what did they do and what are they still doing well.

HOFFMAN: ISIS was, I think, the preeminent pioneer in the use of social media to radicalize and recruit terrorists. I mean, the proof is in the fact that they recruited on a global basis, 40,000 foreign fighters from at least 120 different countries that came to the caliphate. And back about a decade ago, they did that — this by using these kinds of social media platforms that were just becoming in vogue. They were using what was then called Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and so on. And they use these as very effective tools to reach a worldwide audience, very immediately in real-time at very low cost. And they also engaged in what we might call narrowcasting. Broadcasting is when you put something on a platform and you hope someone watches it. Narrowcasting is they sculpted their messages on social media to appeal to specific demographics in particular countries. And that’s why they succeeded in creating the first truly global terrorist organization.

SREENIVASAN: Do you think that what’s been happening on social media platforms, at least in terms of their own ability to police or their own interest in policing content that is on the platform, that’s been declining, at least in the past couple of years, certainly in the case of Twitter? But I wonder does that accelerate what’s happening here?

HOFFMAN: Oh, absolutely. I think that the uneven track record of social media companies in monitoring and policing the content on their platforms, which at times has been better, at other times worse. Terrorists clearly take advantage of the lapses, clearly try to identify windows of opportunity when they can propagate their messages on a wider scale. And at a time when dollars and cents are the bottom line of what is after all profitable businesses, the tech companies just aren’t willing to invest the time and the personnel required to really tackle what is a very large problem. It’s not a small problem, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be more effectively addressed than it has been.

SREENIVASAN: We have another attack that happened on New Year’s Day. This was a tragedy in Las Vegas with a Cybertruck that exploded. And what do we know whether or not that there’s a connection between these two individuals, between these two attacks happening really within hours of each other, both using electric vehicles that were rented on the same car sharing platform? I mean, it seems like a lot of things to be a coincidence.

HOFFMAN: No, absolutely. And the coincidences go further. Both these individuals served at the same time at Fort Liberty, which was then called Fort Bragg, both deployed to Afghanistan at the same time. But of course, the U.S. Army is a huge enterprise. So, it’s not at all likely that they may have crossed paths. I mean, one was in a special operations unit, was a highly decorated combat veteran. That’s Sergeant Livelsberger from Las Vegas. Shamsud-Din Jabbar was in I.T. and human resources in the Army. So, they may possibly have crossed paths casually. There does not appear to be any connection. The only connection I can perhaps divine is that the Las Vegas attack was probably brought forward. That in other words, that attack was precipitously staged to take advantage of all the attention being showered on the incidents in New Orleans. And it was the assumption of, I believe, Sergeant Livelsberger is that he had to move his attack forward in order to get some of that attention. And that may explain why the gasoline, the fireworks in the Cybertruck didn’t create a larger explosion.

SREENIVASAN: What are some of the factors that we should be watching out for now? I mean, considering that there are this sort of public events and opportunities that will be happening, whether it’s a Super Bowl or the inauguration.

HOFFMAN: That’s exactly right. What we’ve seen over the years is a terrorist group like ISIS in particular, but it’s not only them, deliberately targeting celebratory events. In other words, large gatherings of people coming out to celebrate a public or a national holiday, a concert, a sporting event. We saw this in Nice almost a decade ago in 2016, when on Bastille Day, a truck ran down the promenade in Nice. We saw this at the Bataclan in Paris in November 2015, when terrorists attacked, firstly, a concert by a heavy metal band, but then simultaneously attacked a sports stadium where a major soccer match was going on. We saw an attack on the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England in 2017. The Taylor Swift concert this past summer in August had to be canceled in Vienna. And now, we have Bourbon Street, New Orleans, you know, after Times Square, probably one of the most iconic party going sites in the United States. Las Vegas as well, certainly a place that tourists flock to. So, what we can infer from this is that terrorists are deliberately targeting venues with large gatherings of persons to inflict the maximum casualties. And of course, this is going to result in a reconsideration of the security measures at all big events and appropriate measures are going to be taken to ensure those who attend that they will feel safe and not stay at home.

SREENIVASAN: Bruce, it seems that the Intelligence Community over the past few years has placed an emphasis on domestic or homegrown terrorism, right? And I’m wondering, do we have the capacity to protect, you know, our citizens from both the enemies abroad and from within?

HOFFMAN: I think in recent years, especially given the defeat of ISIS’s caliphate in the Levant and in Iraq, the killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri, for example, who was bin Laden’s successor as commander of al Qaeda, the killing of al-Baghdadi, the founder and leader of ISIS and so on, has bred a sense of complacency that terrorism was very much in our rearview mirror. And if we had to focus on any aspect of terrorism, it was from homegrown, whether it was violent left-wing or violent right-wing extremists in the United States, and we kind of forgot about the threat from overseas. But what we’re learning now, especially in the aftermath of the tragedy in New Orleans, is that we have to have security and intelligence establishment that cover the waterfront of threats coming from established nation states, peer competitors like China and Russia, rogue states like Iran and North Korea, but also, against terrorist enemies, both foreign and domestic.

SREENIVASAN: So, how do we figure out? I mean, you know, look, this is one of those difficult conversations that members of Congress try to have, right? I mean, where should we put which kinds of dollars? Should we be more concerned about attacks from outside or attacks from inside?

HOFFMAN: I think, unfortunately, we have to be concerned about attacks from both. I mean, don’t forget, until September 11, 2001, the single most lethal terrorist attack in the United States was perpetrated by an American killing fellow Americans, and that was the bombing of the Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 persons. Very similar to the New Orleans attack, Timothy McVeigh was an Army veteran as well. Was operating with one or two other confederates who were former Army buddies, but wasn’t part of any terrorist organization, wasn’t following anyone’s orders, but took this upon himself. And I think we have to be vigilant for the 00 to counter the entire range of threats that we face. And also have the physical measures in place to make it much more difficult for terrorists to attack. And as you know, there’s been tremendous discussion about the bollards issue, for example, or the wedges that would have made it far more difficult for that vehicle to jump up on the sidewalk and mow down the pedestrians there. I mean, that was clearly a lapse that there were police cars blocking off Bourbon Street because the bollards didn’t work, but no one imagined that an assailant would jump up on the curve with a vehicle and then mow people down. But that’s exactly what happened in Barcelona on the famed Las Ramblas promenade in 2017. So, we have to learn from previous terrorist tragedies and make sure that the physical measures in place are both state of the art, are in fact working, and indeed are anticipating a variety of kinds of attacks.

SREENIVASAN: What other kinds of improvements have happened where we have, I guess, better resolution on a crime? Unfortunately, not before it’s happening or during the crime, but afterwards.

HOFFMAN: Certainly, developments like the advent of artificial intelligence are assisting the Intelligence Community in sifting through material at a far faster rate using algorithms that they might have in the past. So, certainly there are tremendous advantages, firstly in processing and analyzing data, in obtaining the data that would have been completely unimaginable five or six years ago. But I still think, and I worry we’re behind the curve. And for me, the biggest threat looking into the future, and one that I don’t believe we have an effective answer to is what are called UAS, unmanned aerial drones, in essence, unmanned aerial vehicles, drones, which have been used on battlefields, which is we saw on October 7, 2023 in Israel were used to facilitate the attack from Gaza. And which we’ve seen drones being used for surveillance purposes in the United States now on numerous occasions, including the unexplained deployment of drones in New Jersey just last month. And I’m not entirely sure that our defenses against attacks using that type of weapon are as robust as they need to be. Unfortunately, the history of responding to terrorism is closing the barn door after the horse has already gotten out. But this is one example where we can get ahead of the threat that I’m sure will materialize.

SREENIVASAN: Has the military been doing enough or have there been programs that the military has engaged in, given that we’ve had so many incidents of veterans going through mental anguish of all sorts? How does such an enormous force wrap its hands around the people that are struggling who might still be active or who might be retired? What do we do?

HOFFMAN: The Biden administration actually had a very aggressive program, a task force in the Pentagon that looked at precisely this issue and worked very closely with the Departments of Veterans Affairs. So, this problem and this proclivity amongst the small number, small percent of veterans to take to violence for whatever reason has been recognized and has been understood. The question is, always, how much is enough and how much more needs to be done given that we are aware of this problem to bring these kinds of services to our veterans? Certainly, in the book that myself and my co-author Jacob Ware wrote, “God, Guns and Sedition,” we found that there was a high percentage of former veterans who were becoming increasingly politically alienated, felt disenfranchised from the political system and increasingly saw violence as a solution. And part of addressing that proclivity, I think, was recognized in the creation of this task force at the Pentagon, who worked with the Department of Veterans Affairs to address this problem.

SREENIVASAN: Bruce Hoffman, fellow for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security at the Council on Foreign Relations, thanks so much for joining us.

HOFFMAN: You’re very welcome.