TERRORISMThe Bondi Beach Shooting Shows ISIS Threat in Australia and Beyond
The attack in Sidney, Australia, comes at a time when several alleged terror plots in Europe have reportedly been foiled. The resilience of the ISIS ideology and ongoing concerns over extremist violence put an added burden on security officials to safeguard the many public events occurring at year’s end.
Evidence that the Islamic State allegedly inspired the attack that killed at least fifteen people at a Hanukkah event in Australia could spur new concern about the reach of the terrorist group six years after it was defeated militarily. Australian authorities say that flags and explosive materials linked to the father and son who mounted the attack points to the influence of ISIS.
The attack comes at a time when several alleged terror plots in Europe have reportedly been foiled. The resilience of the ISIS ideology and ongoing concerns over extremist violence put an added burden on security officials to safeguard the many public events occurring at year’s end.
Australian officials say the gunmen who launched the attack on the Jewish celebration in Sydney were motivated by “Islamic State ideology.” What does this mean about the current threat of ISIS?
This linkage signals that the threat from ISIS, and the lethal ideology that both it and al-Qaeda embraces, continues even as we approach the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks. It took a ninety-country coalition five years to defeat the Islamic State after it declared a caliphate and took control of parts of Syria and Iraq. But the group has shown that it can survive, albeit in a different form (e.g., a terrorist group), and still pose a threat to global security. ISIS’s abiding anti-Western ideology and theological justification for targeting infidels (including Christians, Jews, and Muslims who do not adhere to its austere religious practice), has sustained the group from its origins in the late 1990s when it was closely allied with al-Qaeda.
This could be surprising to many given that in 2019 the Islamic State and the caliphate it had established were defeated and many of its leaders killed. But while ISIS was defeated as a governing body, the coalition involved did not eliminate the group entirely or completely undermine its ideology. Accordingly, ISIS simply reverted to its roots as a terrorist organization.
