WASHINGTON — The FBI says it recovered the stark black banner of the Islamic State extremist group from the truck that an American man from Texas smashed into New Year’s partygoers in New Orleans’ French Quarter Wednesday, killing 15 people.
The investigation is expected to look in part at any support or inspiration that driver Shamsud-Din Jabbar may have drawn from that violent Middle East-based group, or from any of at least 19 affiliated groups around the world.
President Joe Biden said Wednesday evening that the FBI had told him that “mere hours before the attack, (Jabbar) posted videos on social media indicating that he was inspired” by the Islamic State.
Routed from its self-proclaimed caliphate in Syria and Iraq by a U.S. military-led coalition more than five years ago, the Islamic State has focused on seizing territory in the Middle East more than on staging massive al-Qaida-style attacks on the West.
Here’s a look at the Islamic State, its current status, and some of the offshoot armed groups and so-called lone wolves that have killed under the Islamic State flag.
What is the Islamic State?
The Islamic State also is known as both IS and ISIS, or the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
It began as a breakaway group from al-Qaida.
Under leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, IS had seized stunning amounts of territory in Iraq and Syria by 2014. Within territory under its control, it killed and otherwise abused members of other faiths and targeted fellow Sunni Muslims who strayed from its harsh interpretation of Islam.
By 2019, a U.S.-led military intervention had driven Islamic State from the last inch of its territory. Al-Baghdadi killed himself, and two children near him, that same year, detonating an explosive vest as U.S. forces closed in on him.
Currently, the central Islamic State group is a scattered and much weakened organization working to regain fighting strength and territory in Syria and Iraq. Experts warn that the group is reconstituting itself there.
And that ISIS flag? Typically, it’s a stark black banner with white Arabic letters expressing a central tenet of the Islamic faith. Countless Muslims around the world see the coercive violence of the group as a perversion of their religion.
What’s the influence of the Islamic State today?
Some experts argue the Islamic State is powerful today partly as a brand, inspiring both militant groups and individuals in attacks that the group itself may have no real role in.
The Islamic State’s ruthless credo and military successes have helped spur affiliated groups in Africa, Asia and Europe. It’s a greatly decentralized alliance.
Many offshoots have carried out lethal attacks, such as a March 2024 attack blamed on an Afghanistan-based affiliate of the Islamic State that killed some 130 people at a Moscow theater.
What’s the group’s track record for inspiring attacks in the United States?
The New Orleans rampage reflects the deadliest Islamic State-inspired attack on U.S. soil in several years.
Other attacks over the last decade include a 2014 shooting rampage by a husband-and-wife team who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California, and a 2016 massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, by a gunman who fatally shot 49 people, pledged his allegiance on a 911 call to al-Baghdadi and raged against the “filthy ways of the West.”
Those attacks coincided with an influx of thousands of Westerners — some of them Americans — who traveled to Syria in hopes of joining the so-called caliphate.
In the aftermath of those killings, the threat from radicalized followers of the group had appeared to wane in the U.S. Defense Department strikes have taken out other Islamic State members and the FBI has had significant success in disrupting plots before they come to fruition.
But over the last year, FBI officials have warned about a significantly elevated threat of international terrorism following Hamas’ rampage in Israel in October 2023 and the resulting Israeli strikes in Gaza.
The SITE intelligence group reported IS supporters celebrating in online chat groups Wednesday.
