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.
“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.
Mateen, a U.S.-born Muslim, swore allegiance to ISIS during the attack. It later emerged that he had been a regular at the club.
The Bourbon Street area of New Orleans contains several LGBT clubs, and Khawaja said this might have influenced Jabbar, as ISIS is a profoundly homophobic organization.
Birth of ISIS
Khawaja said that after 9/11, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an Islamic extremist who had been operating in Afghanistan, moved to the Middle East and founded al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), which he led until he died in 2006.Abu Omar al-Baghdadi took over the group until he died in 2010.
Khawaja said Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi then became the leader of AQI and eventually rebranded it as ISIS.
According to Khawaja, in 2011 when the Arab Spring began and there was an uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi sent Abu Mohammad al-Golani to Syria to set up a Syrian wing of the group.
“Basically al-Qaeda split into two at that time. One became ISIS, which was headed by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and the other was Jabhat al-Nusra, which in English means al-Nusra Front in Syria, headed by al-Golani,” Khawaja said.
In 2014, the al-Nusra Front group was losing the war in Syria, and ISIS was on the march, taking over huge swaths of territory in northern Iraq and eastern Syria and declaring a caliphate, with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as its leader.
ISIS, with its distinctive black flag and its brutal version of Sharia law, struck terror in its enemies and drew recruits from all over the Muslim world.
Before ISIS existed, Islamist terrorists conducting attacks in the West declared allegiance to al-Qaeda. However, the number of atrocities appeared to grow as ISIS gained control of territory in the Middle East.
In January 2015, terrorists killed 17 people in Paris during attacks on the offices of the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine—which had published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad—and a Jewish supermarket.
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula claimed responsibility for the Hebdo attack, which was carried out by brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi. Two days after his death, a video emerged of the supermarket attacker, Amedy Coulibaly, pledging allegiance to ISIS. Coulibaly said that he had coordinated his actions with the Kouachi brothers.
In March 2017, a terrorist killed five people, including a police officer, during an attack near the Houses of Parliament in London, and ISIS claimed responsibility.
British police said at the time that they believed the attack was inspired by extremist ideology but had found no evidence that the suspect had direct links to ISIS or al-Qaeda.
Khawaja said ISIS had often claimed responsibility for lone-wolf attacks even when there was no real evidence of any link.
He told The Epoch Times: “Their modus operandi was, if the attacker was killed in the attack, then ISIS would claim responsibility for that attack. But if the attacker is somehow alive, or was arrested alive, then they won’t issue a statement for a couple of days.”
He said ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack, which killed 137 people and injured another 180.
Khawaja said: “They did it despite knowing that the attackers were not really acting like ISIS operatives. They had made some basic mistakes, like waving the flag in the wrong order, and making the testimony [from the Quran] with the left-hand index finger, rather than the right-hand one, and so many things like that.”
He said conspiracy theories began to circulate over the Crocus City Hall attack, with some suggesting that Ukrainian intelligence had carried it out under a false flag.
The United States claimed that ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K), a branch of ISIS based in Central Asia, was behind the attack. Russia disputed this, and Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, claimed that the United States had sought to “cover itself and its proxy—the [Kyiv] regime—by resorting to the ISIS bogeyman.”
ISIS Propaganda Outlets
Khawaja said ISIS has had various ways of communicating with the outside world.Between July 2014 and September 2016, it published an online magazine, Dabiq, which was replaced by Rumiyah, the Arabic name for Constantinople or Istanbul, which ran until September 2017.
He said its main media organ is now the al-Naba newsletter, which is published weekly online.
Despite the losses, terrorist attacks in the West continued.
In March 2018, an attacker who claimed allegiance to ISIS killed four people in the French town of Carcassonne and the nearby village of Trèbes.
There were further attacks in Belgium, the UK, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Philippines. ISIS also claimed responsibility for an attack in November 2018 in Melbourne, Australia, in which three people died.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in October 2019 in tunnels beneath a compound in Barisha, in northwestern Syria.
Trump, who said DNA tests had confirmed that the body belonged to Baghdadi, added, “The thug who tried so hard to intimidate others spent his last moments in utter fear, panic, and dread—terrified of the American Forces bearing down.”
‘Ideology Will Remain Attractive’
Rossa McPhillips, a counterterrorism expert in the UK, told The Epoch Times, “Whether ISIS exists as a group or not, is irrelevant.”He said Osama bin Laden never held any territory for al-Qaeda, but extremists would still pledge allegiance to the organization when committing jihadist atrocities.
“ISIS has some street cred because it took over [swaths] of territory and was more vehement in its practices of extreme Islam. Al-Qaeda hasn’t gone away, but it is diminished. Groups did pledge allegiance to al-Qaeda before ISIS came on the scene, but a lot of it was jumping on the 9/11 bandwagon to gain more notoriety and fame for the group,” McPhillips said.
“But when it comes to extremist Islam, like the far-right or extreme left, the ideology will remain attractive as it gives a simple analysis of the world. It provides succinct answers to difficult questions. And that’s hard to defeat.”
It also detailed operations in Syria, led by the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, including one that resulted in the capture of a person described as an “ISIS attack cell leader.”
U.S. officials have said ISIS is hoping to stage a comeback in Syria following the fall of Assad.
Khawaja said ISIS cells are “scattered here and there” in Iraq and Syria and are “quite strong in the desert,” where they have mounted hit-and-run guerrilla attacks.
He said: “Just before the fall of the regime in Syria, they were about to capture a town called al-Sukhnah, which is a major town, in eastern Syria. It was about to fall, but somehow it was foiled by the Americans and also by the Russians.”
Khawaja said he doesn’t think that ISIS will make a comeback anytime soon but that “the idea lives on. It keeps inspiring these people, these terrorists.”
“ISIS are not in territorial possession in Iraq and Syria, but they are making inroads in other countries, like Mozambique, where they control certain districts in the north that border Tanzania,” he said.
Khawaja said there are also armed groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo that are affiliated with ISIS.
“Sometimes, the organizations just do it to instill fear and to acquire some expertise. They pledge allegiance to ISIS, even though they had nothing in common with ISIS to start with, just because it garners more attention in the media and more people are attracted to them,” he said.
Khawaja said he believes that the conflict in Gaza could have drawn more people to ISIS. However, regarding the New Orleans attacker, he stated, “There is nothing to suggest this guy had any kind of grievance toward Israel.”
