Even as the IS has now declined in the Middle East, “lone-wolf attacks” have continued in Western countries. One major reason is its especially effective brand of propaganda for recruiting members, which once drew people to Iraq and Syria from faraway countries.

First, a brief history of ISIS

The Islamic State first emerged in 2004 following the US invasion of Iraq. The US said the Iraqi government held “Weapons of Mass Destruction”, a claim later proven to be false. A local offshoot of Al-Qaeda, called Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), was then founded by one Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

According to the think tank Council for Foreign Relations, “Zarqawi’s organization took aim at US forces, their international allies, and local collaborators. It sought to draw the United States into a sectarian civil war by attacking Shias and their holy sites to provoke them to retaliate against Sunni civilians.” The group believed that Iraq’s majority Shia community held disproportionate influence in its society.

Zarqawi was killed in a strike in 2006. The group was then renamed the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), reflecting ambitions to spread control over the eastern Mediterranean (al-Sham), that is, countries such as Lebanon, Israel and Syria.

This period also saw instability in Iraq and Syria, with a civil war beginning in the latter in 2011, and the IS took advantage of the unrest. Through violent tactics such as suicide bombings, it was able to spread its control. It was also well-funded, taking control of oil and other resources in the region.

Under its new leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ISIS announced a “caliphate” in June 2014, stretching from northern Syria to the Iraqi province of Diyala, northeast of Baghdad. Later, it re-named itself as Islamic State to signify unity under the caliphate.

A 2020 paper published in the Journal of Strategic Security notes, “At its zenith in 2014, ISIS had managed to take over approximately 40 percent of Iraq and 60 percent of Syria. It also attracted over 40,000 foreign fighters to its ranks from over 130 countries.”

Soon, a US-led coalition began attacks against the group. From October 2014 onwards, “The United States conducted more than 8,000 airstrikes in Iraq and Syria. ISIS suffered key losses along Syria’s border with Turkey”, a report from the US think tank Wilson Center says. It gradually lost support and withdrew from key cities, even as it continued attacks – including one in 2015 by an Egyptian affiliate group on a Russian plane that killed 224 people.

US President Donald Trump declared that ISIS was defeated in December 2018. US-backed forces, however, continued fighting and the last holdout in Baghouz, Syria, fell on March 23, 2019.

How does Islamic State recruit its members?

IS was known for deploying propaganda in a way not previously done by militant groups, including online videos with high production values, alongside an active presence on social media websites that were then emerging. The New York Times recently reported that this digital presence ranges from a weekly newsletter to dark web channels.

The 2020 Journal of Strategic Security The paper interviewed more than 200 people previously part of the IS cadre. It found that 8.2 percent said they were recruited solely over the Internet. “Evidently, today’s social media and the intimacy of chat and video interactions makes it feasible for terrorist recruitment to occur solely over the Internet—something policy makers in every country from which ISIS fighters came must consider in terms of ISIS continuing to recruit, now less for travel, and more for homegrown attacks,” it said.

Recent lone-wolf attacks include the 2016 Nice truck attack in France, the 2016 Berlin Christmas market attack and the 2017 London Bridge attack.

It further noted that for the Muslims interviewed, IS seemed like deliverers of the promise of a utopian society. Many living in the West were also troubled by instances of racist and Islamophobic attacks for wearing their religious clothing or other reasons. This also corresponds to how over the past year, FBI officials have warned about the re-emerging threat of international terrorism after Hamas’ attack on Israel in October 2023 and the resulting Israeli strikes in Gaza.

For non-Muslims, “the dream of becoming significant, having purpose, and a positive Islamic identity were strong drivers to ignore the warning signs about joining ISIS.” Once they joined the group, however, many grew disillusioned.

Another study led by Columbia University assistant professor Tamar Mitts in 2019 found that “the vast majority of ISIS’s Twitter followers were inspired by propaganda emphasizing the personal benefits that people could supposedly enjoy by joining the group — benefits like getting a free home in the caliphate, finding a spouse, and feeling camaraderie with fellow fighters. Every time ISIS released messages extolling such “material, spiritual, and social” perks of jihadism… the Internet lit up with tweets declaring people’s intentions to join the group.” Videos of beheading and other violent actions, on the other hand, only found support among the most loyal believers in the group’s ideology.

That also poses a challenge for social media giants, whose detection algorithms can often catch violent actions but not non-violent propaganda videos. For law enforcement agencies too, the diffused nature of such propaganda proves challenging to detect.

Abdur-Rahim Jabbar, younger brother of the suspect in the New Orleans attack, told the AP that he did not detect signs of Jabbar being lured into propaganda. Although he had been isolated in the last few years, he’d also been in touch with him recently. However, Jabbar reportedly had a troubled personal life and struggled with money in recent years.