Deadly attacks in Australia and Syria show a diminished ISIS is still a threat

Two deadly attacks this month, in Syria and Australia, have shone a new spotlight on the Islamic State, the militant group whose sudden rise to power in the Middle East and reign of terror around the world seemed to peak and then collapse during the 2010s.

But for experts who study ISIS, the law enforcement and intelligence officials who fight it, and the growing number of victims attacked or intimidated, the group has long been more depressed than extinct — a diminished threat, but a menace nonetheless.

“They never left,” said Aaron Zelin, an expert on the group and a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “The nature of the threat has simply changed and the nature of how they have organized has changed. But what drives the Islamic State has never changed.”

Last weekend, a member of Syrian security forces shot and killed three Americans – two soldiers and an interpreter – near the town of Palmyra. The Islamic State has not claimed responsibility for the attack, but the U.S. and Syrian governments have both blamed the terrorist group.

The U.S. military launched strikes against Islamic State infrastructure and weapons sites in Syria in retaliation for the attack, officials said Friday.

“We are striking very hard against ISIS strongholds in Syria, a country bathed in blood and with many problems, but with a bright future if ISIS can be eradicated,” President Donald Trump said Friday in an article on Truth Social.

In Sydney, two men opened fire on a Hanukkah gathering at Bondi Beach on Sunday, killing at least 15 people. Both men were shot dead by police. A man is dead; the other, the man’s son, survived and was charged with the attack. Islamic State social media accounts traditionally linked to the group praised the attack but did not officially claim responsibility, calling it “the pride of Sydney” in an official post. Both suspects were found with Islamic State flags and documents.

Although both incidents were notable for their geographic scope, the identities of those killed and the perception that the Islamic State had disappeared from global media, experts say they were exceptions that belie any measurable measure: ISIS is weakening and arrests and attacks have declined globally.

“There will always be room for attacks here and there. But the trajectory is that ISIS is still in decline,” said Renad Mansour, a researcher at Chatham House, a London-based foreign policy think tank. “Anyone who has a grievance and finds a network can attack, and in many cases the central leadership of ISIS doesn’t know it’s happening until it happens, and then they claim it.”

The group has claimed 1,100 attacks so far in 2025, it said, compared to 3,460 in 2019.

So far in 2025, there have been 383 ISIS-related arrests worldwide, Zelin said, citing the Washington Institute’s Selected Global Islamic State Activity Map, an initiative he leads. Reports from police sources revealed 531 such arrests last year, Zelin said, the vast majority of which took place in active war zones like Iraq and Syria.

In particular, the recent attacks highlight a strategy that has made the Islamic State effective in the past: its big-tent approach to operations and ideology that allows “lone wolf” actors to affiliate with ISIS with almost no vetting or coordination.

“This is something that we’re seeing more and more features of ISIS-related activities going back 10 years,” Rebecca Weiner, deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism at the New York Police Department, told NBC News. “The DIY model was professionalized and truly deployed around the world by ISIS, inspiring dozens of people to carry out attacks in their name. »

The Islamic State emerged from the Syrian civil war in the early 2010s, when the country’s porous borders and abundance of Islamist fighters provided fertile recruiting ground for all manner of jihadist groups. But ISIS distinguished itself by forming an autonomous state encompassing parts of Syria and Iraq, promising a return to the political expansionism of early Islam.

Although defeated, this “caliphate” remained a central part of the Islamic State’s message, even as the group focused more on terrorism than nation-building.

Both suspects in the Bondi Beach shooting are known to have traveled to the Philippines before the attack. If investigators find that the two men received ISIS commando training in the southern island of Mindanao, it could indicate a level of centralized coordination that investigators have not seen from ISIS in years.

The group’s activities over the past year have also demonstrated enduring, if attenuated, public appeal.

On Tuesday, Polish authorities said they had arrested a teenager who they said had sought contact with the group and whom they suspected of planning an attack on a Christmas market.

In Michigan in October, two men were charged with planning a mass shooting over Halloween weekend.

And almost a year ago, an ISIS-inspired American Muslim killed 14 people by driving a truck into New Year’s revelers in New Orleans.

Islamic State has still failed to reconstitute its so-called caliphate, a sprawling Islamist emirate that the group ruled in parts of Iraq and Syria until its final destruction in 2019. In both countries, Islamic State attacks reached a historic low last year.

Where the group has made progress and managed to build up some territory is in the Sahel region of northwest sub-Saharan Africa, in countries like Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger.

The Islamic State’s presence in remote, arid and sparsely populated parts of Africa may still give the group’s members and potential recruits the impression of mere survival rather than prosperity.

“Even though they are active in several African countries, they don’t have the same kind of ideological respect because there is so much history in the Arab world linked to Islam,” Zelin said.

And although the Sydney terrorist attack was a deadly success, many Islamic State attacks have been thwarted by law enforcement as the multinational sharing of the fight against terrorism has become much stronger.

Although observers say it is too early to say that the recent attacks constitute a resurgence of the group, two relatively recent changes could help revive its fortunes. The fall of Bashar al Assad’s regime in Syria a year ago reignited chaos in the country, providing a greater opening for Islamic State.

When Syrian President Ahmed Al Sharaa — himself a former Islamist militant who once led a like-minded Al Qaeda-affiliated group — joined the U.S.-led Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS last month, he set a target behind the Syrian government’s back.

Even before that, an attack claimed by the Islamic State on a church in Damascus, which killed at least 25 people in June, once again focused the attention of Syrian authorities on the threat from the Islamic State.

Meanwhile, the group’s messages exploited Israel’s highly deadly war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip as a rallying cry for attacks against the West. Palestinian health officials say more than 70,000 people have been killed in the war.

“I think the conflict in Gaza has raised the temperature over the last couple of years,” said Colin P. Clarke, executive director of the Soufan Center, a New York-based security think tank. “This has attracted more people who are now consuming information that leads them through social media algorithms to extreme content quite quickly.”

As much of the world gathers for year-end religious holidays, Islamic State’s commandos – whether self-proclaimed or led by its leaders – are also taking notice.

The group has targeted religious festivities in the past, and analysts have warned that a dramatic new attack on Christian, Jewish or Muslim targets could give Islamic State the publicity boost it needs for a deadlier and more influential 2026.

“These are important times where they can try to do things,” Clarke said. “If they can do things again quickly, that would be monumental for them, because they haven’t been able to do things like that in years.”