New Orleans attack puts spotlight on ISIS comeback bid

Despite US-led operations, militant group pulls off major hits while trying to rebuild

- REUTERS

A US Army veteran who flew a black ISIS flag on a truck that he rammed into New Year's revellers in New Orleans shows how the extremist group still retains the ability to inspire violence despite suffering years of losses to a US-led military coalition.

At the height of its power from 2014 to 2017, the ISIS "caliphate" inflicted death and torture on communities in vast swathes of Iraq and Syria and enjoyed franchises across the Middle East.

Its then leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, killed in 2019 by US special forces in north-western Syria, rose from obscurity to lead the ultra-hardline group and declare himself "caliph" of all Muslims.

The caliphate collapsed in 2017 in Iraq, where it once had a base just a 30-minute drive from Baghdad, and in Syria in 2019, after a sustained military campaign by a US-led coalition.

ISIS responded by scattering in autonomous cells, its leadership clandestine and its overall size hard to quantify. The UN estimates it at 10,000-strong in its heartlands.

The US-led coalition, including some 4,000 American troops in Syria and Iraq, has kept hammering the militants with air strikes and raids that the US military says have seen hundreds of fighters and leaders killed and captured.

Yet ISIS has managed some major operations while striving to rebuild and it continues to inspire lone wolf attacks such as the one in New Orleans which killed 14 people.

Those assaults include one by gunmen on a Russian music hall in March 2024 that killed at least 143 people, and two explosions targeting an official ceremony in the Iranian city of Kerman in January 2024 that killed nearly 100.

Despite the counterterrorism pressure, ISIS has regrouped, "repaired its media operations, and restarted external plotting", acting US director for the National Counterterrorism Centre Brett Holmgren warned in October.