ISIS Never Really Went Away

Staff writer Graeme Wood reported on the Islamic State for years. He shares his thoughts in the wake of the Bondi Beach attack.

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Is ISIS back? In late 2014, the jihadist group made its medieval views infamous using modern methods of propaganda. The organization had recently captured significant territory in Syria and Iraq, and claimed religious authority over all Muslims. The internet educated the world on the harsh, simple rules of a caliphate, and the surreal brutality of the beheading video. When the Islamic State lost control of its Middle Eastern territories some five years later, the group largely dropped out of the headlines. It had been defeated, but it didn’t disappear.

This week, ISIS reemerged in connection with two disparate acts of violence thousands of miles apart. Two U.S. soldiers and a civilian interpreter were killed in Syria by a man the Pentagon says is affiliated with ISIS. A day later, at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, two men opened fire at a Hanukkah celebration, killing 15 and wounding dozens. The men had homemade ISIS flags in their car, and had recently traveled to an area in the Philippines where ISIS-affiliated groups are known to still be active. Are these incidents connected? And do they point to a group that’s evolving?

Our guest this week, the Atlantic staff writer Graeme Wood, reported extensively on ISIS during its heyday. He compares the group to a trick birthday candle, capable of reigniting quickly. Wood explains the new patterns and, as we learn more about the motivations of the Bondi Beach shooters, what the world might expect going forward.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

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Hanna Rosin: A decade ago, ISIS was infamous worldwide. At its peak, in 2014, the jihadist group controlled territory in Iraq and Syria roughly the size of Kentucky. It declared itself a caliphate, with authority over Muslims everywhere. Hard to forget from that period were the beheading videos, which ISIS released as a twisted form of propaganda.

Five years later, the group lost control of that territory. And then, for the most part, we didn’t hear much about them. ISIS disappeared from the headlines—until this week.

In Syria, someone the Pentagon believes is affiliated with ISIS killed two U.S. soldiers and an interpreter. And then, of course, Bondi Beach, in Australia: A father and son killed 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration. They were found to have homemade ISIS flags in their car, and they’d also recently traveled to the southern Philippines, which has seen Islamist violence for years.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. And today: Is ISIS back?

Graeme Wood: It’s sort of like a self-lighting birthday candle, where you blow it out, and it looks like it’s out, but then the little spark is enough to reignite it. And so what we’re seeing right now is the reignition, after some years, of a spark in this one place. And it’s gonna be really difficult to find out the other places where another spark has not been totally extinguished and could come back and reignite.

Rosin: Staff writer Graeme Wood has traveled the world—throughout the Middle East, the Philippines, and even Australia—in order to interview ISIS members and supporters.

In 2016, he wrote a book about the group, The Way of the Strangers: Encounters With the Islamic State. He’s kept an eye on ISIS ever since.

Today, he talks to us about how, in the years after the group’s defeat, ISIS never really went away and about what the recent violence might mean.

Wood: What’s always interesting with these attacks—’cause some people can be sort of fanboys of ISIS, and they carry the icons of ISIS with them but don’t know much about it. These people traveled to Mindanao in the southern Philippines, which we don’t hear that much about in the Americas, because we think of ISIS, in its heyday, as being centered in Syria, which it was. But ISIS had this brilliant idea of kind of bringing in affiliates, where they would find groups that were already Islamist in some way, maybe not Islamist in exactly the same way as ISIS, but they would bring them on and get what they called pledges of loyalty, or baya’a, from them.

And in the Philippines, they found an excellent target, which was a group called Abu Sayyaf, which was already fighting against the Philippine government, was already Islamist, and that just needed a little bit of help from ISIS central command to kind of go pro and join the big leagues of international global jihadism.

And that’s what happened in 2014, was that Abu Sayyaf became part of the ISIS network after operating as a local jihadist group for over a decade in the southern Philippines. And back in 2014, 2015, some of the people who I interviewed at great length in Australia, they were supporters of ISIS who didn’t even consider going to Syria. They went to, or tried to go to, the southern Philippines because that’s where they thought the center of gravity was.

And that’s exactly where the two alleged killers in Bondi Beach—one of whom’s dead, and the other one is just waking up from a coma right now—where they went about a month before the attack. So that’s awfully suspicious.

Rosin: All right, so you’ve been to Mindanao. Walk me through what happens there. And we’ll caveat this by saying we don’t have details about what this duo actually did there or who they met with quite yet, but what did you learn when you were reporting in Mindanao?

Wood: I went to Mindanao in the southern Philippines in 2016, and I was looking for ISIS activity, and that’s what I found. There was a very heavy Philippine military contingent that was doing counterterrorism operations there because they knew that ISIS was operating at such strength that it would actually control territory. There would be villages that would come under its control temporarily, and then there were areas that it controlled permanently.

And it took another year or so until the Philippine government really started to get the upper hand. And they claim to have eliminated it, but, of course, there are still attacks going on. And if you are in that part of the world—that is, Asia—and you want to go and find ISIS activity and hook up with ISIS people, then that’s probably where you would go, and that’s where the two killers in Bondi Beach seem to have gone.

Rosin: And that remains true to this day—’cause you’re describing a trip that happened about eight years ago, but you’re saying that the activity has continued.

Wood: Yeah, so ISIS has sort of two operational modes. The first one is where they control territory, and they can implement Islamic law as they see it. The second mode is where they’re attempting to get that territory. And up until 2017, it actually controlled that territory and could do their ISIS thing.

Since then, they’ve been in this other mode where they’re more like an insurgency. So if these two guys went there and connected with ISIS there, then they were connecting with people who were in military mode rather than governance mode. And if they came back, they came back with instructions in that regard.

Rosin: Okay, so what details do we actually have about their trip there, just to be clear?

Wood: Yeah, we have confirmation from the government of the Philippines that they arrived, what their citizenships were and their names, which pretty much narrows down that it was actually them, and that they went listing their destination as Davao City, which is the largest city in Mindanao and not a city that has ever been controlled by, or even come close to being controlled by, ISIS. But it is the gateway to the south of the Philippines, where there are places that have been controlled by ISIS, and we don’t know where they went from Davao.

There are innocent reasons to go to Davao, and there are very sinister reasons. And the fact that these guys perpetrated a mass killing, it appears, when they came back, of course, makes us think that the sinister reasons are the ones that apply.

Rosin: Right, okay, so now we’re in speculation territory, but if you had to speculate, what is the picture that you would put together? Fill in the dots: What would actually happen to them there that would aid them in committing this act? This is speculation, but—

Wood: We do have to speculate, of course. Neither of these guys is a trained soldier or gunman, so even getting a little bit of tactical training could be helpful to them. The dad, I believe, was a fruit salesman—“fruiterer,” as they call them in Australian. And the son was an out-of-work bricklayer. So neither of these guys kill people for a living.

And you can see in the videos that they’re moving around somewhat competently—not totally incompetently. Remember, one of them had his weapon taken away by another fruiterer, actually. And so that doesn’t suggest that he was the most competent person.

But if you go to the Philippines, and you connect with people who have been fighting for a while, then you can get ideological connection, you can get military training, and then you can come back being a bit more deadly than you would’ve been had you not gone there.

Rosin: So that’s these two guys in this very specific training. I wanna broaden out to get a little bit more of the context.

So going back to Australia: There have been this series of anti-Semitic incidents in the country—a kosher deli in Sydney, a synagogue in Melbourne that were set on fire last year, homes and cars in largely Jewish neighborhoods in Sydney were vandalized with anti-Semitic hate speech, another Melbourne synagogue was set on fire back in July, and now this attack. Do experts see these events as connected or related to what happened in Bondi Beach? How do you put that bigger picture together?

Wood: Well, Bondi Beach is part of the eastern suburbs of Sydney, where it’s just known—it’s a center of Jewish community and residential communal life. So if there’s gonna be a background level of anti-Semitic violence, which there unquestionably has been since 2023, then that is going to be expected to be one of the areas where you’re gonna see that. And indeed, that’s where you have. You mentioned the firebombing of a deli, but there’s also things like cars that are being destroyed mysteriously in these neighborhoods. And I think a lot of Australian Jews and residents in that area, very reasonably, see this as part of an anti-Semitic crime wave.

Now, the origins of it are a bit hazier, and there’s reasons to think that there might be independent origins of some of these attacks. In the case of the firebombing of the deli in Bondi Beach in 2024 and of the synagogue in Melbourne, the Australian government has just come out and said, This is done with the direction of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is a really bold statement to make—to accuse a foreign government of doing that. And they, in fact, expelled the ambassador of Iran as a result of this, a very, very high-level step. So that’s one kind of flow of these incidents.

The other, though, seems to be different. These two guys, there’s speculation of whether they are directed by Iran, but most of the evidence is suggesting that they’re directed by the Islamic State, which is an enemy of Iran that has fought the Islamic Republic of Iran on several fronts. And so it would be weird if they were cooperating with Iran. What, instead, you’ve got is multiple forms of jihadism that, in the last couple years, seem to be directed mostly at Australian Jews.

Rosin: That’s very helpful ’cause I’m trying to disentangle these different patterns, see which ones are related, and how they’re related. But ISIS hasn’t specifically targeted only Jewish groups in the past, so how do you make sense of the specific targeting of a Jewish celebration and Jewish targets? What is that change about?

Wood: Yeah, Hanna, you make a really important point here. If you looked at the focus of ISIS activity in the past, you would not see a lot of attacks on Jewish groups or on Israel. So many different horrible attacks that I could name in the history of ISIS, very few of them focused on Israel. And if you asked ISIS why, they told me pretty directly, Look, our focus is on Muslim apostates. They are closer to us. We hate them more. And in our apocalyptic view of the world, there’s a kind of drumbeat of an order of operations that we’re looking at, and Israel doesn’t enter the picture until pretty late in the game. Jews are not the ones we’re attacking.

But obviously, that’s changed. So in 2016 or so, you would’ve seen ISIS fighting Iran, fighting Iraqi Shia, fighting Kurds in Iraq. That was one of the main areas of operation and targets—almost nothing in Israel. So what’s happened, I think, in the meantime, is ISIS has lost territory, and Iran has lost relative power ’cause some of its proxies have been taken apart. And now, there’s a different focus because ISIS has changed, and its enemies have changed. And Israel—and by extension, Jews in general—are in the crosshairs.

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Wood: I think that ISIS, like any group, reads the news. What occurs to them to attack is not always because they have an apocalyptic order of operations, but also because they see what motivates people, what excites people. And since October 7, 2023, the main cause that is likely to animate ordinary people—or ordinary people who are ISIS-curious, at least—is Gaza, is Israel, and again, by extension, any random Jew who’s just celebrating a holiday. So not too surprising that there would be just a background level of anti-Semitic attacks and also a specific focus on Jews by Islamic State supporters.

Rosin: After the break: Why Australia? And how does Bondi Beach connect with the attacks on American soldiers in Syria?

[Break]

Rosin: So a few broader questions about ISIS. I do think of ISIS as operating mainly in their own territories, so why are they carrying out attacks in Australia?

Wood: Back in 2014, when ISIS was in the headlines for its activity in Syria, I went to Australia, and I asked supporters there, What do you care about? What’s important to you about this, and what makes you so crazy? And they were pretty clear. They said, We’ve got territory now. We have a place where we can implement Islamic law, and that’s what matters to us. We need to take the version of Islam that we believe in and turn it into a state.

And so how does it help them to do that if you blow up a random place in Australia? Not much. In fact, it might stop them from being able to do that effectively in Syria if they start attacking elsewhere, because the rest of the world won’t put up with it, and they’ll be deprived of their sanctuaries in Syria.

So now we’re in a very different situation, and ISIS is too. ISIS had that territory that it wanted to jealously protect where it could implement Islamic law, and now it doesn’t. And so when times change, ISIS’s strategy changes.

And so they focus, first of all, on the places where they do have some territory, and that’s in Nigeria, a little bit of territory in Mozambique. But everywhere else, they’re now more in a terrorist mode of attacking elsewhere, so you see smaller attacks. And all those people in Australia who are the friends and descendants of those who I interviewed 10 years ago about ISIS, those people now have different priorities. They have no Syria to go to, and so they’re thinking more about what they can do at home. And it seems to be the case with these two, if their having an ISIS flag in their car is any indication, that they’ve decided that the way that they can help the cause is to attack Jews in their own country of Australia.

I think in the heyday of ISIS, eight to 10 years ago, we in the West—and that includes Australia—were, in a sense, spared some of the worst because, of course, the bad things were happening over there. People were focused on getting over there. And the fact that there was an “over there” to get to made people very excited about the cause. There were a lot of people who said, Wow, we thought it would be a hundred years before there was a new caliphate that we could fight for, and so we’re really energized about this.

Well, there’s no more caliphate, so the energy from having a caliphate is now depleted. But there’s still a lot of people who are focused on building a caliphate and supporting the pathetic little territory that the caliphate still retains. And those people aren’t going away.

Not much has happened on the whole—there’s not an attack in Bondi Beach like this every year, thank goodness. But we should expect a lot of the Islamic State supporters, who in the past have been focused on trying to travel to Islamic State territory and be Muslims there, that is gonna be an energy that’s directed inward. There’s nowhere for them to attack except for where they stand, whether that be in Poland, Germany, Paris, or Bondi Beach.

Rosin: Yeah, what I’m taking from this is that those of us who are not close watchers of ISIS like you, we just assumed it had gone away, or we just weren’t thinking about it. It wasn’t in the headlines. The caliphate died. That’s the end of it. But what you’re describing is a completely different global picture.

Wood: Yeah, ISIS, one thing that it really had going for it ideologically was a certain kind of simplicity. And as long as you have that simplicity, it’s possible for people to rediscover them, even long after ISIS has ceased to be on the front page of every newspaper.

Rosin: Okay, there’s one more piece of this puzzle that we haven’t discussed, which is the Bondi Beach attack happened just a day after two U.S. soldiers and an interpreter were killed in Syria by the man the Pentagon says is affiliated with ISIS. What do we know about the killing, how is it related to everything we’ve been talking about, and what does it signal to you?

Wood: There is a connection with Bondi Beach in that the Islamic State has done the attacks in Syria, and it appears that these two people in Bondi Beach are Islamic State as well. But Syria’s a pretty different operational space—and you have to go all the way back to 2013.

The current government of Syria and ISIS were basically the same thing back then, and then they split. And the current government of Syria is now an ex-jihadist movement that has been attacking the Islamic State, with the cooperation of the United States.

So what we’re seeing is that ISIS no longer has the upper hand in any part of Syria and that it has to infiltrate parts of the security services to get close enough to the partners of the current government and attack them. And that’s what it seems like they did effectively this weekend, was get someone that was close enough to some American soldiers and then shoot them dead.

Rosin: Right, right, so that is a constant danger for the U.S. soldiers who are still there: the possibility of someone from ISIS who’s an enemy of the current government and an enemy of the current government’s allies sneaking in and causing mayhem.

Wood: Yes. And to do that, they don’t have to get a plane ticket to do it. These are Syrians. The leadership of the current government, Ahmed al-Sharaa, and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi were personally acquainted back in the day, so it’s not like these are people who have to be brought in from abroad to infiltrate. They are just Syrians who were there and who have ISIS sympathies and have to be screened for—in this case, I guess, unsuccessfully—because they’re trying to do ISIS stuff within Syrian territory, which is, to say, their own home territory.

Rosin: Understood. So it’s especially dangerous because you can’t entirely tell who’s affiliated with whom, who’s pretending. It’s a nuanced situation.

Wood: Yes, that’s right. And it cuts both ways too. Given that these are Syrians, the current government is filled with people who know them, that means they can sniff ’em out better. So there are ups and downs to it, but the fact of the matter is that Syria has had lots of ISIS supporters within it for a long time. And so, when you flip the government to being a Sunni government that’s anti-ISIS, then you’re gonna have a bunch of Sunni extremists who you have to keep an eye on and make sure they haven’t wriggled their way into the security services and gotten close to the Americans.

Rosin: So in the coming days, weeks, I’m sure we’ll get more information about the Bondi Beach attackers, their travels, their motivations. What is it that you’ll be looking for? What details will be important to you?

Wood: In the past, with Islamic State attacks, the people who have done them have not been shy about saying why, and the fact that they’re shooting into a crowd of Jewish families, you can make some pretty obvious inferences about their general view of Jews. But finding out, “What, really, is motivating you? What are you trying to get out of this?”—in the past, they’ve been willing to say that; they’ve even recorded videos of themselves explaining that beforehand.

So in the coming days, I wanna hear what the travel of these two people looks like in the Philippines and also just whether the survivor has a statement to make about why he was doing this and what motivated him, because that’s gonna tell us a lot about some of the most important stuff here, which is: Was there help from the outside? Was there help from the Islamic State in the Philippines? There’s speculation that there was help from Iran. And this becomes a very different situation if it turns out that there’s outside help, and it’s a directed attack rather than what they sometimes call an “inspired” one.

Rosin: And what is the difference? An inspired attack versus a directed attack, what’s the significance of that distinction?

Wood: Some of the distinction is geopolitical. If it turns out that Iran has told these people what to do, made sure that they were funded to do it, then that could mean direct strikes against Iran by Israel. There’s some discussion of that already.

Now, if it turns out that they were directed in the attack from the southern Philippines, then it could mean a new wave of counterterror operations there, which I think it’s unlikely that would include Australian forces in the southern Philippines, but it would certainly mean some probably pretty bloody operations and a renewal of hostilities in the southern Philippines, with the Philippine government against Islamic State people there.

If it turns out that these people just got it in their head that this would be a good idea, and nobody told them how to do it, where to do it, when to do it, then you’re back to the long-term counterterror questions that Australia’s had to think about and has not thought about, I think, hard enough over the last few years.

If you have lots of people in your territory, including your own citizens who think that violence is the answer, who think that random killing of civilians is the answer, then you gotta deal with that. And, obviously, Australia has not been able to do that, given what we’ve seen in the number of violent attacks against Jews in the last couple years.

The soul searching’s barely begun there, but the recriminations have also barely begun.

Rosin: I have to admit—I haven’t thought about ISIS in a long time, which I imagine is true of a lot of people. It does feel like, from what you’re describing, that there’s a return of sorts or an evolution, but I also don’t wanna overstate it, since there’s a lot we don’t know about the attack in Australia. So how do you think about the fact that ISIS-linked killings are in the news again, that even though the term ISIS is in the news again?

Wood: I think a lot of people who watch ISIS closely would say, Oh, they never left. And it’s true that there’s been a thousand, couple thousand ISIS attacks worldwide over the last several years, long since ISIS has been out of the news.

But I think about it in a slightly different way. I think it’s also that ISIS’s inspiration has never gone away for some people. ISIS had such a clear message of: We’re going to reestablish the caliphate. The caliphate is this thing that you, as a Muslim who knows anything at all about his history, it’s something that you’ve read about, and our business is bringing it back. So it’s so simple that you can teach people about this, they can learn about it just by reading online about it, and so it’s constantly going to be inspiring a few people, and a few of those people are going to end up being violent.

So I think ISIS, in some sense, never went away. And, in some sense, the ideas are very, very difficult to just get rid of, and as long as they’re out there, occasionally, you’re gonna see attacks like this. It doesn’t mean that there’s gonna be a return to the volume of ISIS attacks that we saw in 2014, ’15, ’16, where there would be hundreds of people killed in churches, theaters, etc. But it does mean that these ideas, they turn out to be very resilient, and long after we forgot about them, other people have remembered them.

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Rosin: Well, Graeme, thank you so much for helping us understand the situation.

Wood: Always good to talk with you.

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited and engineered by Kevin Townsend and fact-checked by Genevieve Finn. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.