Whether ISIS physically exists or not is ‘irrelevant’ to Islamic extremists, says a counterterrorism expert.
When Shamsud-Din Jabbar was planning his attack on New Year’s revelers in the French Quarter of New Orleans, he posted several videos online proclaiming his support for the ISIS terrorist group, including five videos posted on his Facebook page, according to the FBI.
He turned his rented Ford F-150 Lightning pickup truck into Bourbon Street, drove along the sidewalk, and plowed into a crowd, only moments after the FBI said he posted the final video at 3:02 a.m.
The pickup truck crashed to a halt, and Jabbar was gunned down by police officers after he had opened fire on them. A distinctive black ISIS flag fluttered from the back of the truck.
Moign Khawaja, professor of security studies at Dublin City University, told The Epoch Times that there was a common pattern with so-called lone-wolf attackers such as Jabbar.
Khawaja said that such people often suffer from personal problems—Jabbar had recently gotten divorced—and spend too much time on their computer consuming extremist content. “One thing leads to the other, and here we are,” he said.
ISIS has been promoting the method of attack used by Jabbar, Christopher Raia, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s counterterrorism division, said on Jan. 5.
“For the past several years, the FBI has provided intelligence to our law enforcement partners highlighting that ISIS calls for vehicle-ramming attacks,” Raia said.
In one of Jabbar’s videos, he allegedly said he had planned to harm his family and friends but decided against it because he feared that the news headlines would not focus on the “war between the believers and the disbelievers,” Raia said.
The suspect also allegedly revealed in one of the videos that he had joined the ISIS terrorist group before the summer of 2024.
Khawaja, whose book “Islamic State, Media, and Propaganda” is set to be published later this month, said there were some similarities between Jabbar and Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at Pulse—a gay nightclub in Orlando—in June 2016.
