New Orleans attack puts focus on Trump’s counter-ISIS strategy 

The deadly New Orleans attack on New Year’s Day, which authorities say was carried out by a man radicalized by ISIS, is spurring fears of more attacks and raising questions about how President-elect Trump’s isolationist tendencies will affect the war on terrorism. 

Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, a retired U.S. Army veteran from Texas who worked at accounting firm Deloitte, killed 14 people after plowing a truck through the crowded Bourbon Street, marking the first ISIS-inspired attack on U.S. soil since 2017. Jabbar was shot and killed by police.

ISIS has been severely degraded by a U.S.-led campaign in Iraq and Syria, but the terrorist group has rebounded in recent years and claimed responsibility for several deadly attacks across the world in 2024. 

U.S. officials argue it is vital to maintain a presence in Iraq and Syria to keep the threat of ISIS down, but Trump has signaled potentially scaling back troops in the Middle East.  Last month, the incoming president called for a hands-off approach to Syria, a country he tried to withdraw from in his first term, following the collapse of the brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus. 

Aaron Zelin, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said ISIS has recently shown a “higher tempo” of attacks globally and warned of a greater resurgence if Trump were to dramatically minimize the U.S. presence in the Middle East. 

“It would be a monumental mistake, on par with the U.S. withdrawing from Iraq, which provided the space for the Islamic State to come back again, and that would be on his watch,” he said, referring to the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, only to return again in 2014 to combat ISIS. 

A spokesperson for the Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment on how the incoming president will handle threats from ISIS and manage the Middle East. 

Under President Biden, the U.S. has retained its focus on degrading ISIS. Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh told reporters on Friday that ISIS “remains a threat,” even if it is not at the level it posed a decade ago. 

“ISIS retains capabilities, as we've seen in Iraq and Syria, and that's why we have our forces in both of those countries to ensure that ISIS can never reconstitute or resurge or search back to what it was,” she said. 

ISIS rose to power in 2014 but was largely defeated by the U.S. and its allies within five years, losing much of its territory in Iraq and northeastern Syria.  

The U.S. has roughly 2,500 troops in Iraq and around 900 permanent boots on the ground in Syria, though the Pentagon recently announced that a temporary detachment has brought the number to around 2,000. 

While Trump, who takes office on Jan. 20, has yet to make an explicit decision to withdraw troops from Syria, he called in December to keep out of Syrian affairs after rebel groups took over the country. In his first term, Trump tried to withdraw troops but only managed to bring the number down.  

“If there are tendencies within Trump's foreign policy to gear toward isolationism, a resurging ISIS is likely to give that pause, and I hope they do so,” said Colin Clarke, director of research at the Soufan Group. 

“I'm not talking about deploying [more] ground troops to the Middle East, but I think remaining aggressive in terms of attacking the Islamic State overseas is a must, at a minimum,” he added. 

“That means going after command-and-control units, going after high value targets and key leaders, and keeping them off balance, because when the group is able to seize the momentum, we're going to see more of what we saw.”

Iraq may be a more difficult arena for Trump to manage. Last year, Washington and Baghdad announced an agreement to downsize the U.S. presence by 2026, though it’s unclear by how much.  

Zelin, from the Washington Institute, urged Trump to negotiate with Baghdad to ensure there is at least some U.S. forces in the country. 

“The issue is that Iraq and Syria share borders. So even if ISIS is weak in Iraq, if ISIS comes back in Syria, it can pour the resources back into Iraq,” he said. “The future of Iraqi security is just as much tied to the future of Syrian security. So you can't separate one from the other.” 

American forces regularly carry out airstrikes and operations against ISIS, including a December mission that killed the leader of ISIS, Abu Yusif aka Mahmud. 

Still, ISIS-K, the terrorist group’s branch in Afghanistan, has resurged following the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from the nation. ISIS-K has been responsible for attacks last year that killed hundreds in Iran, Turkey and Russia. 

In the West, ISIS was responsible for knifing attacks last year that killed three in Germany and injured a man in Switzerland. An ISIS-inspired plot for a mass attack at an August Taylor Swift concert in Austria was thwarted. 

Jason Blazakis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies who examines violent extremism, said that despite losing territory, ISIS has managed to maintain an online presence, fueling its propaganda machine that can radicalize people to carry out deadly attacks.  

“While ISIS has been degraded in real-world spaces like Syria, they do still have a presence in a number of places where they can gain access to a computer and social media to send propaganda,” he said. “So while they have lost territories in places, it almost doesn't matter, so long as an ISIS propagandist has access to a computer.” 

The attacks also have a way of propagandizing themselves, inspiring copycat attacks. The New Orleans attack bears similarities to the 2017 truck rampage in New York City, which killed eight, also carried out by a man inspired by ISIS. 

White House national security spokesperson John Kirby in a Friday briefing said federal authorities are watching for additional threats “very, very closely and will continue to do so.”

But Blazakis said the U.S. should be investing more resources into counterterrorism operations. 

“We simply aren't doing the same kind of collection against these threats as we were even as recently as five years ago,” he said, calling for Trump to put more resources into the counterterrorism space. “Isolationism isn't going to be a successful recipe for countering the rise of ISIS and Al Qaeda.  

“It doesn't mean that the United States has to put thousands of troops on the ground in places like Syria to do better, but we can invest in trying to build the capacity of countries to fight ISIS in their own backyards, and that might be sending small cadres of individuals to help these governments do that,” he added. 

ISIS generally recruits from conflict-ridden and volatile regions of the world, including nations like Tajikistan, which has a lot of migrants moving to other countries.  

But the terrorist group is trying to radicalize more people directly in the West and in 2022 launched an English-language magazine called the Voice of Khorasan, which is spread online. 

Fears are also mounting that ISIS is seeking to inspire more sophisticated attacks, including calls to use drones and other new technologies.  

But there are also signs that ISIS propaganda may be losing its effect.  

Antoine Baudon, business manager and deputy director at the International Center for Counter-Terrorism, said that recent ISIS attacks have received less enthusiasm and praise because of declining interest for the ideology and self-sacrifice, and the shrinking power of the terrorist group to reward supporters. 

“We're seeing that these attacks don't resonate as much as before, which tends to show that it's more and more isolated,” he said. “They're not seeing the benefits of it. But it doesn't mean that people don't still believe it.”