In the wee hours of the new year, revelers in New Orleans’s French Quarter were still popping champagne and dancing in the streets to live music when their joy suddenly turned to horror.
Around 3:15 a.m., the driver of a Ford F-150 Lightning truck barreled through the crowds on Bourbon Street, killing at least 15 people and injuring dozens more. Among the dead were a young mom, a former college football star, and a 37-year-old father of two. After ramming the crowd, the driver stepped out of the truck and began shooting at police, two of whom were injured and taken to a hospital. The driver was then shot dead by law enforcement. IEDs were also found in other areas in the French Quarter, and authorities have disabled at least two. Multiple surveillance cameras and bystanders captured video of the incident. Here is one angle:
Later, the FBI identified the killer as 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a U.S. citizen and resident of Houston, Texas. After police found an ISIS flag, weapons, and an improvised explosive device (IED) in the truck, what initially appeared to be a random attack by a mentally deranged person came to seem like an act of terror on American soil.
That sense only deepened when, later that same day, a Tesla Cybertruck exploded outside Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, killing one and injuring seven. Authorities are now saying they are investigating both the Vegas incident and the New Orleans massacre as acts of terrorism. While the identity of the Cybertruck driver has not been confirmed, officials insist there is no proof the two attacks are linked—although both vehicles were reportedly rented through the car-share app Turo.
So who is Jabbar? An IT specialist who served in the Army from 2007 to 2015, he was deployed to Afghanistan and later served in the Army Reserve until 2020. After leaving as a staff sergeant on an honorable discharge, he advertised himself as a real estate agent in a 2020 YouTube video. According to the New York Post, he lived in a run-down trailer park with “sheep and goats in the yard—just blocks away from the local mosque” in a neighborhood “on the outskirts of Houston that is home to mostly Muslim immigrants.” Jabbar, according to his brother, had been raised as a Christian but converted to Islam. He started “being all crazy” after his conversion, according to Dwayne Marsh, the husband of Jabbar’s ex-wife, who spoke to The New York Times.
On Sunday night, President Biden said Jabbar was “inspired by” ISIS and had expressed “a desire to kill.” It is not yet known if Jabbar was acting alone. In a statement, the FBI said it is “working to determine the subject’s potential associations and affiliations with terrorist organizations.”
That Jabbar was born and bred in the U.S. raises the question: Could America now be experiencing the same type of Islamist threat that has plagued Europe for years? In 2015, France was shocked by the Bataclan massacre, in which Islamic State extremists murdered 130 people and injured hundreds at a rock concert. Two years later, terrorist bombs killed 22 people, including an 8-year-old, as they left the Manchester Arena after a performance by Ariana Grande. In August of last year, a “soldier of the Islamic State” went on a stabbing rampage at a festival in Solingen, Germany, killing three and wounding eight.
Michael Weiss, co-author of ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, told The Free Press that the jihadist threat does not stop at the borders of the U.S.
Jabbar’s background is “by no means atypical” for a jihadist, Weiss said. The FBI and DOJ have indicted dozens of people, some “not even of a Muslim background,” who still “became radicalized because of the images and the propaganda that they were digesting online.” In October, another U.S. Army member, Cole Bridges, was sentenced to 14 years for attempting to help ISIS murder his fellow American soldiers after being radicalized online by jihadi propaganda.
The 9/11 model of foreign hijackers infiltrating the United States is “not how it works anymore,” according to Weiss.
“When ISIS had an actual perch that spanned a territory the size of the UK, from Syria to Iraq, what they would do is they would bring people in, train them up in the deserts of Syria, and then dispatch them back to their native countries, where they could go on these rampages and set things off, such as the Bataclan massacre in Paris,” he said. “But when the caliphate crumbled, they increasingly looked to remote control or remote operations.”
Many of the cases Weiss has examined in the past decade involve people who “are among us.” Indeed, in a 2023 lecture by the National Counterterrorism Center’s then-director, Christine Abizaid, she warned that “the American public today is more likely to experience a terrorist attack by an individual attacker than a highly structured terrorist organization.”
“I’m less worried about migrants doing this kind of thing than I am about the disaffected and extremely emotionally unstable elements within our own society that we seem to be producing at an industrial scale,” Weiss said.
When the threat comes from within the United States, it’s also very hard to neutralize. “Apart from catching these people before they do something bad, destroying any kind of infrastructure they may have here, there’s not much you can do,” said Weiss.
The New Orleans massacre should be a wake-up call to those who see Islamism primarily as a problem far away from home, Hannah E. Meyers, director of policing and public safety at the Manhattan Institute, told The Free Press.
We “let our guard down,” she added. “That someone went to joyous, jubilant New Orleans on New Year's Eve to commit a jihadi motivated terrorist attack, if that’s what it's confirmed to be, is a sign that we should have been more vigilant and more diligent,” she said. “There is a real threat.”
While using a car is “obviously very low-tech,” Weiss said, the “butcher bill here could have been a lot higher had any of these bombs that he had constructed, or whoever else he was working with had constructed, gone off.”
Though there is much still to be learned about the New Orleans attacker, “clearly, he was an American,” Weiss said. “That's what frightens me more, to be honest.”
