Australia Shooting Is a Reminder of Islamic State’s Power to Inspire Attacks

ISIS is too weakened to seize territory, experts said, but its ability to churn out propaganda aimed at provoking violence against the West persists.

In Australia, a father and son gunned down 15 people celebrating a Jewish holiday at the beach. In England, a Syrian-born British citizen rammed a car into people and attacked others with a knife outside a synagogue on Yom Kippur. On Tuesday, the Polish authorities arrested a law student suspected of plotting to attack a Christmas market.

All of them were accused of supporting the Islamic State, a terrorist group whose deadly ideology continues to inspire adherents to commit atrocities years after its core organization was badly degraded.

The recurring bloodshed shows the group has adapted to a post-caliphate era. It is weakened compared with a decade ago, when it held large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria, and instead now wields propaganda as its most potent tool to inspire deadly attacks.

“A resurgence would be too strong of a word,” said Colin P. Clarke, a counterterrorism analyst at the Soufan Group, a global intelligence and security firm based in New York. “But the essence of terrorism, beyond the lethality, is the psychological impact, which makes a group like ISIS seem stronger and more omnipresent than it actually is.”

The Bondi Beach massacre in Sydney, Australia, came a day after a member of Syria’s security forces killed two U.S. Army soldiers and an American civilian interpreter in Palmyra, Syria. President Trump blamed the Islamic State, and officials said the gunman had been slated to be fired because of his extremist views.

Terrorism experts expressed concerns that the success of the Sydney attack could fuel more extremist plots as the holidays approach, with European Christmas markets an attractive target. Such lone-wolf attacks require little funding and are difficult to predict and prevent because they are aimed at vulnerable targets, like open-air crowds.

The Islamic State’s “resilience lies in its malleability, surviving by shaping itself around its new realities,” Rita Katz, the executive director and founder of the SITE Intelligence Group that tracks terrorism, wrote in an analysis.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States and its allies have greatly diminished the abilities of terrorist organizations to carry out sophisticated plots by taking the fight to their redoubts in such countries as Syria, Afghanistan, and Libya, and by deploying superior firepower and technology.

A Sunni Muslim insurgent group, the Islamic State traces its beginnings to Iraq. After local militias and American troops defeated a branch of Al Qaeda fighters, the group rebranded as the Islamic State. It exploited the chaos of Syria’s civil war more than a decade ago to seize vast swaths of territory in the country and in neighboring Iraq.

The group gained notoriety for kidnappings, sexual enslavement and public executions in the Middle East. It orchestrated or inspired terrorist attacks across Europe, including coordinated assaults in France in November 2015 that killed 130 people and suicide bombings in Belgium a year later in which nearly three dozen were killed.

But its self-proclaimed caliphate was largely routed nearly seven years ago by U.S. troops and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in northeastern Syria.

Because it no longer holds much territory, the Islamic State relies even more on its longstanding playbook of spreading its radical ideology online and through clandestine cells and regional affiliates. Last year, the Islamic State’s Khorasan branch, based in Afghanistan, claimed responsibility for major attacks in Iran, Russia and Pakistan.

The Islamic State’s propaganda urges followers to target gatherings of non-Muslims and provides detailed advice on using guns, bombs, vehicles, knives or a combination of methods to increase casualties. It is “essential to leave some kind of evidence or insignia identifying the motive and allegiance,” the group has told followers.

British investigators said that the assailant in the synagogue attack that took place on Yom Kippur on Oct. 2 in Manchester pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in a phone call to the emergency services while the assault was underway. Following the Bondi attack, Australian police found two homemade Islamic State flags in a car the gunmen drove to the scene — evidence that the Islamic State’s messages were getting through to people vulnerable to radicalization, experts said.

“Terrorism breeds in squalid corners of the internet where poisonous ideologies, of whatever sort, meet volatile, often chaotic individual lives,” the head of Britain’s MI5 domestic intelligence agency, Ken McCallum, warned in October.

On Wednesday, the authorities announced charges against the surviving suspect in the Bondi shooting, including murder and terrorism offenses.

The attacks on Jewish communities in England and Australia were part of a measurable increase in antisemitic attacks since Israel’s invasion of Gaza in response to the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, that left about 1,200 people dead and another 250 taken hostage. Israeli attacks on Gaza have killed more than 70,000 people, according to the health authorities there, who don’t distinguish between civilians and Palestinian fighters.

In her analysis, Ms. Katz wrote that the Islamic State launched a media campaign after Oct. 7, triggering lone-wolf activity in the West. She pointed to attacks in Belgium, Germany, Serbia and Switzerland, among others. In addition, investigators foiled a plot against a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna that the C.I.A. said could have resulted in massive casualties.

The arrest of the student in Poland came on the heels of another potential attack in Germany, where five men were detained after the authorities said they learned about a plot to crash a vehicle into people at a Christmas market.

In the United States, the Islamic State remains a threat, but the number of people charged in connection with the group remains low compared with previous years, according to researchers. Despite robust U.S. law enforcement capabilities, a man rammed a truck into revelers on a New Orleans street early on New Year’s Day, killing 14 people. The man had an Islamic State flag in his truck, and officials said the group had inspired him.

While the Islamic State’s official English-language propaganda output has diminished since the height of its power, its past publications remain available online and supporters are translating its ongoing Arabic work into multiple languages, said Aaron Y. Zelin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

“They put out content every day; they continue to call for attacks against Jews,” Mr. Zelin said. “Pretty much every single Islamist plot and attack in the West is still ISIS-related. It still remains pre-eminent within the global jihadi world.”

Still, while noting the number of global Islamic State attacks has receded over the years, Mr. Zelin added, “People underestimate it at their own risk. They are still very active.”

The status of the Islamic State reflects the shifting dynamics of counterterrorism, experts said. In Syria, for example, U.S. personnel and the security forces of Syria’s new government have collaborated to thwart more than a dozen suspected Islamic State plots since the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government a year ago, U.S. officials said.

“One of the most challenging aspects of countering a global network like ISIS is that even when counterterrorism authorities make significant progress in weakening some of the organization’s affiliates, the group is never truly defeated, and even small remnants can remain potent enough to help facilitate terrorist attacks,” Mr. Clarke said.

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