After the ISIS Attack in Iran, Is the Terror Group Reemerging as a Global Threat?

When the terrorist group ISIS took credit for killing 84 Iranians in a two-man suicide bombing last week, many news consumers probably reacted by asking themselves, “ISIS? Are those guys still around?”

From 2015–17, the group, also known as ISIL and the Islamic State group, had savagely ruled 12 million people in a swath of northwestern Iraq and eastern Syria that its leaders declared to be a “caliphate.” But then, after intense fighting, a coalition led by U.S., Iraqi, and Kurdish troops ousted the militiamen from their final holdout in the Iraqi town of Mosul.* By 2019, its scattered bands of followers elsewhere in Asia, as well as a few in Europe, folded as well, and that seemed to be the end of the group’s sordid story.

Bruce Hoffman, senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations, said in a phone conversation this week that the group has since diminished further, focusing on “hyperlocalized” operations, since its regional and global ambitions ended in disaster. But, he emphasized, it didn’t vanish entirely, and its members or acolytes have, now and then, proved themselves capable of devastating, if random, destruction.

The Jan. 3 attack took place at the gravesite of Qassim Suleimani, the leader of Iran’s military and terrorist operations throughout the Middle East, on the fourth anniversary of his assassination. (He was killed in a U.S. drone strike near Baghdad’s airport in Iraq.) ISIS, a Sunni Muslim group, views Shiite Muslims, such as Iran’s leaders, as apostates in need of killing. Suleimani’s memorial, which gathered hundreds of devout Shiites in one concentrated area, was a ripe target. (In addition to the 84 killed, another 284 were injured.)

It is not known how the two ISIS agents, armed with belts of explosives, infiltrated the crowd. Hoffman thinks they probably crossed the border from Afghanistan, where the group has its largest chapter, known as ISIS-Khorasan Province, or ISIS-K. That group consists of somewhere between 1,500 and 4,000 fighters, many of whom regularly engage in fighting against the country’s Taliban rulers.

At first Iran blamed Israel for the bombing at Suleimani’s gravesite­—an unlikely claim, as Israel’s attacks inside Iran have been targeted assassinations, for instance against nuclear scientists. When ISIS publicly took credit, Iran’s state news media claimed that ISIS had taken orders from Israel, a risible charge that Iranian leaders almost certainly don’t believe themselves.

ISIS-K has conducted operations in Iran before. In 2022, a gunman killed 15 Iranian Shiites at a shrine in Shiraz. In 2018, gunmen killed 25 people attending a military parade in Ahvaz. In 2017, a gunman fired shots inside the parliament in Tehran, while simultaneously, suicide bombers killed 17 people near the mausoleum of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of Iran’s clerical state.

The group’s most ambitious attack took place in Sri Lanka on Easter in 2019, when ISIS (or perhaps ISIS-inspired) terrorists exploded backpack suicide bombs in four hotels and three churches, killing more than 260 people, including five American citizens.

However, none of these attacks set off any sequels or wider revivals. They were one-off acts of mass violence, having no political effect other than to show that ISIS still exists.

ISIS-K has spread to nearly all provinces in Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover in 2021, mounting at least 334 attacks that year, up from just 60 the year before. Elsewhere, though, the group has little to show for itself. According to Hoffman’s research, it has a few thousand followers in Syria and Iraq, a shadow of its former self—about 500 ISIS-related fighters in Egypt, 200 in the Philippines, and fewer than 100 in Libya.

Al-Qaida, another terrorist group that seems to have disappeared, is a bit more active, with between 7,000 and 12,000 fighters in Somalia, a few thousand in Syria, another few thousand in the Arabian Peninsula, and between 180 and 400 in the Indian subcontinent. It too is engaged more in local attacks than in regional, much less global, operations.

For this reason, terrorism is seen as little more than a blip on the radar screens of U.S. military and intelligence chiefs, who are preoccupied these days with more conventional threats posed by Russia, China, North Korea, and state-sponsored terrorists—such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis—linked to Iran.

Still, stateside incidents do pop up; for instance the 2019 attack by an agent of al-Qaida Arabian Peninsula, who killed three U.S. service members and wounded eight others at a naval air base in Pensacola, Florida. Hoffman thinks that U.S. officials have stepped back a little too far from monitoring foreign terrorists. Then again, he is more worried now about domestic terrorism, as indicated in the title of his new book, just out this month, God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America.