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4 hours ago
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After the two men who carried out stateside terror attacks on New Year’s Day were revealed as veterans of the war on terror, public scrutiny about the role of American servicemen in such incidents came into focus.
The New Orleans attacker, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, was a 13-year veteran of the US army, while the Las Vegas suicide bomber was an active-duty Green Beret.
Since, media and academia have rightfully pointed out the correlations between active duty and former servicemen in acts of extremist violence: they are statistically the most likely demographic to be a “mass casualty offender”. A no more obvious example is the January 6 attacks in 2021, which saw at least 230 people with US military backgrounds storm the Capitol.
While there are countless historical cases of veterans or American soldiers perpetrating domestic terrorism on behalf of far right organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, a growing number also involves jihadist groups.
“Whether it is white supremacists or Islamic extremists, they have got to do a better job of rooting these folks out,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE), on the Pentagon’s lack of a plan for tackling extremism in the ranks, writ large.
“They threaten national security and public safety, and dealing with this issue should be at the top of everyone’s list.”
Jabbar, for example, had served in Afghanistan. Despite that service in a conflict born out of dismantling al-Qaida, Jabbar pledged his terrorist attack to the Islamic State, its offshoot, which promptly claimed to have inspired his actions. The former army soldier also brought the black flag of IS to his car-rampage on Bourbon Street.
And just two days before Jabbar’s attack, a US military contract linguist pleaded guilty in a Kansas court for his affiliation to IS and lying to obtain his national security clearance. The FBI was tipped to the linguist after “his interactions with known members of Isis”, according to a court document.
Besides recent anecdotal evidence, credible numbers back up a link. In a December 2024 University of Maryland study on “criminal extremism” among individuals with US military backgrounds, “6% were connected to, or inspired by, Salafi Jihadist groups, including al-Qaeda and its affiliated movements and [IS]”.
That 6% includes 23 people who were “connected to, or inspired by” al-Qaida and its affiliated movements and 19 individuals inspired by IS. All of those individuals had US military backgrounds, with just over 10 of whom were active duty soldiers.
While Beirich is an expert on far-right extremism and not jihadist organizations, she thinks “this rise shows that the military has more work to do on extremism of all kinds”.
Online, in IS forums and encrypted chat rooms, supporters and operatives celebrated Jabbar’s attack and his military service.
“[Thanks] to that war, a very religious Muslim,” said an IS supporter account on Telegram about Jabbar and his service, “therefore he turned from a fighter against terrorism to an executor [...] and this is something that cannot be controlled.”
Even so, organizations like IS and al-Qaida are not yet at a crisis level of recruiting American soldiers to its cause.
“In a few cases, they have attracted individuals serving in the armed forces,” said Joshua Fisher Birch, a terrorism analyst at the New York-based Counter Extremism Project.
“The perpetrator of the 2009 Fort Hood Shooting, where a US army psychiatrist killed 13 people and wounded 32 others, had communicated with al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki.”
Fisher-Birch also pointed out another example from 2020, when Ethan Melzer, a US soldier and follower of the extremist and satanic group the Order of Nine Angles, passed sensitive information about his unit’s troop movements to an undercover FBI agent he believed to be a member of al-Qaida. Melzer wanted to facilitate an ambush on the unit.
“Melzer hoped the attack would lead to a new war in the Middle East, leading to mass death,” explained Fisher-Birch.
Lucas Webber, a senior threat intelligence analyst at Tech Against Terrorism, said part of the attraction to IS and other parallel jihadist groups among individuals with US military backgrounds could be what’s driving some civilian government workers from service.
“The Islamic State has aggressively and persistently leveraged hostile sentiments stirred up by the Israeli military response to Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attack and the subsequent prolonged conflict,” said Webber.
Historically, any flare ups in the conflict between Palestinians and Israel has become a boon in recruitment for ISIS, Al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups.
“IS has sought to exploit these developments to incite violence, recruit, and fundraise,” he said. “The organization has zeroed in on the United States and framed it as the most powerful backer of Israel.”
There has been a staggering number of US government workers, including officials at State, who have resigned in protest over the war in Gaza and the Biden administration’s unwavering support for it.
Nidal Hasan, the 2009 Fort Hood shoot, was a military psychiatrist and had expressed concerns to superiors about the atrocities he had heard about from soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, prior to his mass shooting.
