Islamic State-inspired driver expressed desire to kill before deadly New Orleans rampage, Biden says
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A U.S. Army veteran driving a pickup truck that bore the flag of the Islamic State group wrought carnage on New Orleans’ raucous New Year’s celebration, killing 15 people as he steered around a police blockade and slammed into revelers before being shot dead by police.
The FBI said it was investigating the attack early Wednesday as a terrorist act and did not believe the driver acted alone. Investigators found guns and what appeared to be an improvised explosive device in the vehicle, along with other devices elsewhere in the city’s famed French Quarter.
President Joe Biden said Wednesday evening that the FBI found videos that the driver had posted to social media hours before the attack in which he said he was inspired by the Islamic State group and expressed a desire to kill.
The rampage turned festive Bourbon Street into a macabre mayhem of maimed victims, bloodied bodies and pedestrians fleeing for safety inside nightclubs and restaurants. In addition to the dead, dozens of people were hurt. A college football playoff game at the nearby Superdome was postponed until Thursday.
Zion Parsons, 18, of Gulfport, Mississippi, said he saw the truck “barreling through, throwing people like in a movie scene, throwing people into the air.”
“Bodies, bodies all up and down the street, everybody screaming and hollering,” said Parsons, whose friend Nikyra Dedeaux was among the people killed.
“This is not just an act of terrorism. This is evil,” New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said.
The driver “defeated” safety measures in place to protect pedestrians, Kirkpatrick said, and was “hell-bent on creating the carnage and the damage that he did.”
The FBI identified the driver as Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, a U.S. citizen from Texas, and said it was working to determine any potential associations with terrorist organizations.
“We do not believe that Jabbar was solely responsible," FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Alethea Duncan said at a news conference.
Investigators found multiple improvised explosives, including two pipe bombs that were concealed within coolers and wired for remote detonation, according to a Louisiana State Police intelligence bulletin obtained by The Associated Press.
The bulletin, relying on preliminary information gathered soon after the attack, also cited surveillance footage that it said showed three men and a woman placing one of the devices, but federal officials did not immediately confirm that detail and it wasn’t clear who they were or what connection they had to the attack, if any.
Jabbar drove a rented pickup truck onto a sidewalk, going around a police car that was positioned to block vehicular traffic, authorities said. A barrier system meant to prevent vehicle attacks was being repaired in preparation for the Super Bowl in February.
Jabbar was killed by police after he exited the truck and opened fire on responding officers, Kirkpatrick said. Three officers returned fire. Two were shot and are in stable condition.
Investigators recovered a handgun and AR-style rifle, according to a law enforcement official who was not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
A photo circulated among law enforcement officials showed a bearded Jabbar wearing camouflage next to the truck after he was killed. The intelligence bulletin obtained by the AP said he was wearing a ballistic vest and helmet. The flag of the Islamic State group was on the truck's trailer hitch, the FBI said.
“For those people who don’t believe in objective evil, all you have to do is look at what happened in our city early this morning," U.S. Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, said. "If this doesn’t trigger the gag reflex of every American, every fair-minded American, I’ll be very surprised.”
Jabbar joined the Army in 2007, serving on active duty in human resources and information technology and deploying to Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010, the service said. He transferred to the Army Reserve in 2015 and left in 2020 with the rank of staff sergeant.
Hours after the attack, several coroner’s office vans were parked on the corner of Bourbon and Canal streets, cordoned off by police tape with crowds of dazed tourists standing around, some trying to navigate their luggage through the labyrinth of blockades.
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry urged people to avoid the area, which remained an active crime scene.
“We looked out our front door and saw caution tape and dead silence and it’s eerie,” said Tessa Cundiff, an Indiana native who moved to the French Quarter a few years ago. "This is not what we fell in love with, it’s sad.”
Nearby, life went on as normal in the city known to some for a motto that translates to “let the good times roll.” At a cafe a block from where the truck came to rest, people crowded in for breakfast as upbeat pop music played. Two blocks away, people drank at a bar, seemingly as if nothing happened.
Biden, speaking from the presidential retreat at Camp David, called the attack a “despicable” and “heinous act.” Addressing the victims and the people of New Orleans, he said: “I want you to know I grieve with you. Our nation grieves with you as you mourn and as you heal.”
“My heart goes out to the victims and their families who were simply trying to celebrate the holiday,” Biden said in an earlier written statement. “There is no justification for violence of any kind, and we will not tolerate any attack on any of our nation’s communities.”
The attack is the latest example of a vehicle being used as a weapon to carry out mass violence and the deadliest IS-inspired assault on U.S. soil in years.
FBI officials have repeatedly warned about an elevated international terrorism threat due to the Israel-Hamas war. In the last year, the agency has disrupted other potential attacks, including in October when it arrested an Afghan man in Oklahoma for an alleged Election Day plot targeting large crowds.
What is the Islamic State, and what attacks has it inspired by offshoots and lone wolves?
WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI says it recovered the stark black banner of the Islamic State extremist group from the truck that an American man from Texas smashed into New Year's partygoers in New Orleans' French Quarter Wednesday, killing 15 people.
The investigation is expected to look in part at any support or inspiration that driver Shamsud-Din Jabbar may have drawn from that violent Middle East-based group, or from any of at least 19 affiliated groups around the world.
President Joe Biden said Wednesday evening that the FBI had told him that “mere hours before the attack, (Jabbar) posted videos on social media indicating that he was inspired” by the Islamic State.
Routed from its self-proclaimed caliphate in Syria and Iraq by a U.S. military-led coalition more than five years ago, the Islamic State has focused on seizing territory in the Middle East more than on staging massive al-Qaida-style attacks on the West.
But in its home territory the Islamic State has welcomed any chance to behead Americans and other foreigners who come within its reach. And it has had success, although abated in recent years, in inspiring people around the world who are drawn to its ideology to carry out ghastly attacks on innocent civilians.
Here's a look at the Islamic State, its current status, and some of the offshoot armed groups and so-called lone wolves that have killed under the Islamic State flag.
What is the Islamic State?
The Islamic State also is known as both IS and ISIS, or the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
It began as a breakaway group from al-Qaida.
Under leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, IS had seized stunning amounts of territory in Iraq and Syria by 2014. Within territory under its control, it killed and otherwise abused members of other faiths and targeted fellow Sunni Muslims who strayed from its harsh interpretation of Islam.
By 2019, a U.S.-led military intervention had driven Islamic State from the last inch of its territory. Al-Baghdadi killed himself, and two children near him, that same year, detonating an explosive vest as U.S. forces closed in on him.
Currently, the central Islamic State group is a scattered and much weakened organization working to regain fighting strength and territory in Syria and Iraq. Experts warn that the group is reconstituting itself there.
And that ISIS flag? Typically, it's a stark black banner with white Arabic letters expressing a central tenet of the Islamic faith. Countless Muslims around the world see the coercive violence of the group as a perversion of their religion.
What’s the influence of the Islamic State today?
Some experts argue the Islamic State is powerful today partly as a brand, inspiring both militant groups and individuals in attacks that the group itself may have no real role in.
The Islamic State's ruthless credo and military successes have helped spur affiliated groups in Africa, Asia and Europe. It's a greatly decentralized alliance.
Many offshoots have carried out lethal attacks, such as a March 2024 attack blamed on an Afghanistan-based affiliate of the Islamic State that killed some 130 people at a Moscow theater.
What’s the group’s track record for inspiring attacks in the United States?
The New Orleans rampage reflects the deadliest Islamic State-inspired attack on U.S. soil in several years.
Other attacks over the last decade include a 2014 shooting rampage by a husband-and-wife team who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California, and a 2016 massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, by a gunman who fatally shot 49 people, pledged his allegiance on a 911 call to al-Baghdadi and raged against the “filthy ways of the West.”
Those attacks coincided with an influx of thousands of Westerners — some of them Americans — who traveled to Syria in hopes of joining the so-called caliphate.
In the aftermath of those killings, the threat from radicalized followers of the group had appeared to wane in the U.S. Defense Department strikes have taken out other Islamic State members and the FBI has had significant success in disrupting plots before they come to fruition.
But over the last year, FBI officials have warned about a significantly elevated threat of international terrorism following Hamas’ rampage in Israel in October 2023 and the resulting Israeli strikes in Gaza.
The SITE intelligence group reported IS supporters celebrating in online chat groups Wednesday.
“If it’s a brother, he’s a legend. Allahu Akbar,” or “God is great,” it quoted one as saying.
Sugar Bowl CFP quarterfinal between Georgia and Notre Dame postponed after deadly truck attack
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The College Football Playoff quarterfinal at the Sugar Bowl between Georgia and Notre Dame was postponed a day because of an attack about a mile away from the Superdome early Wednesday, when a truck plowed into a New Year’s crowd and killed 10 people.
The game, originally scheduled for 7:45 p.m. Central at the 70,000-seat Superdome, has been pushed back to Thursday night, Sugar Bowl CEO Jeff Hundley said.
“Public safety is paramount,” Hundley said at a media briefing alongside federal, state and local officials, including Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry and New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell. “All parties all agree that it's in the best interest of everybody and public safety that we postpone the game for 24 hours."
U.S. Rep. Troy Carter said the decision to postpone the game “was not done lightly.”
“It was done with one single thing in mind: public safety — making sure that the citizens and visitors of this great city, not only for this event, but for every event you come to in Louisiana, that you will be safe,” Carter added. "And we will use every resource possible.”
Landry said he had a message for those thinking, “Man, do I really want to go to the Sugar Bowl tomorrow?”
“I tell you one thing: Your governor’s going to be there,” Landry said. "That is proof, believe you me, that that facility and this city is safer today than it was yesterday.”
Hundley said work was underway to "set up a safe and efficient and fun environment" at and around the Superdome on Thursday night. “We live in the fun-and-games world with what we do, but we certainly recognize the importance of this and support (public safety efforts) 100%.”
The Superdome was on lockdown for security sweeps on Wednesday morning, when people with offices in the Superdome — including officials with the Sugar Bowl and Sun Belt Conference — were told not to come into work until further notice.
Some credentialed Superdome employees were permitted into offices by Wednesday afternoon.
The casualties occurred when a driver rammed a pickup truck into a crowd of revelers in New Orleans’ famed French Quarter early on New Year’s Day, injuring more than 30 people. The driver was killed in a firefight with police following the attack at about 3:15 a.m. along Bourbon Street near Canal Street, the FBI said.
The Georgia and Notre Dame football teams arrived in New Orleans on Sunday and have been staying at downtown hotels just blocks away from where the violence occurred.
Statements from the University of Georgia Athletic Association and from Notre Dame said both schools had accounted for all team personnel and members of official travel parties.
“To be in solidarity with those who suffer is to exemplify the spirit of Notre Dame,” said university president the Rev. Robert A. Dowd. “Today, we are in solidarity with all those impacted by this tragedy.”
A statement from Georgia athletic director Josh Brooks offered prayers for “everyone involved in this horrific event, and we are here to support them in any way possible.”
Georgia president Jere Morehead said the university confirmed that a student was among those critically injured. Morehead said the university is in contact with the student’s family to offer support.
New Orleans City Council President Helena Moreno told WDSU-TV earlier Wednesday, before the postponement was announced, that the security perimeter around the Superdome was being "extended to be a larger zone.”
“So expect obviously extra security," she said. "There are more police officers who are coming in.”
The Superdome, which is about 20 blocks away, also is scheduled to host the Super Bowl on Feb. 9.
The first Super Bowl after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, also was held in New Orleans, and there was a massive security perimeter for that game including street closures surrounding the Superdome and officers — including snipers — on the tops of surrounding high-rise buildings, as well as on the roof of the dome itself.
“We are deeply saddened by the news of the devastating incident in New Orleans,” the NFL said in a statement. "The NFL and the local host committee have been working collaboratively with local, state and federal agencies the past two years and have developed comprehensive security plans.
“These planning sessions will continue as they do with all major NFL events," the statement continued. "We are confident attendees will have a safe and enjoyable Super Bowl experience.”
