A pair of deadly attacks this month, in Syria and Australia, has shone a fresh spotlight on the Islamic State, the militant group whose sudden rise to power in the Middle East and reign of terror throughout the world had appeared to crest, and then fall, during the 2010s.
But for experts who study ISIS, law enforcement and intelligence officials who fight it and the growing number of victims who have been attacked or intimidated, the group has long been more down than out – a diminished threat, but a threat nonetheless.
“They never went away,” said Aaron Zelin, an expert on the group and a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “The nature of the threat just changed and the nature of the way they organized themselves changed. But what’s animated the Islamic State has never changed.”
Last weekend, a member of Syria’s security forces shot dead three Americans -- two soldiers and an interpreter -- near the city of Palmyra. The Islamic State didn’t claim responsibility for the attack, but the U.S. and Syrian governments both blamed the terrorist group.
The U.S. military launched strikes against Islamic State infrastructure and weapons sites in Syria in retaliation for the attack, officials said Friday.
“We are striking very strongly against ISIS strongholds in Syria, a place soaked in blood which has many problems, but one that has a bright future if ISIS can be eradicated,” President Donald Trump said Friday in a post on Truth Social.
In Sydney, two men opened fire on a Hanukkah gathering at Bondi Beach on Sunday, killing at least 15 people. Both men were shot by police. One man died; the other, the man’s son, survived and has been charged in the attack. Islamic State social media accounts traditionally linked to the group praised the attack but did not officially claim responsibility, referring to it in an official publication as "Sydney's pride." The two suspects were found with Islamic State flags and literature.
While the two incidents were notable for their geographic spread, the identities of those killed and a perception that the Islamic State had faded from global headlines, experts say they were exceptions that belie a measurable metric: ISIS is getting weaker, and arrests and attacks have been declining globally.
“There will always be some space for attacks here and there. But the trajectory is that ISIS is still on the decline,” said Renad Mansour, a research fellow at Chatham House, a London-based foreign policy think tank. “Anyone who has a grievance and finds a network can basically attack, and in many cases the central ISIS leaders don’t know it happens until it happens, and then they claim it.”
The group has claimed 1,100 attacks so far in 2025, he said, down from a high of 3,460 in 2019.
There have been 383 ISIS-related arrests worldwide so far in 2025, Zelin said, citing the Washington Institute’s Islamic State Select Worldwide Activity Map, an initiative he leads. Reporting from police sources found 531 such arrests last year, Zelin said, the vast majority of which occurred in active war zones such as Iraq and Syria.
One thing the recent attacks showcase is a strategy that has made the Islamic State effective in the past: its big-tent approach to operations and ideology that allow “lone-wolf” actors to affiliate themselves with ISIS with almost no vetting or coordination.
“It’s something we’re seeing more of and more of the hallmarks of ISIS-related activity that date back 10 years ago,” Rebecca Weiner, Deputy Commissioner Intelligence and Counterterrorism at the New York Police Department, told NBC News. “The do-it-yourself model was professionalized and has been really deployed around the world by ISIS, inspiring dozens of people to carry out attacks in their name.”
The Islamic State emerged from the ferment of Syria’s civil war in the early 2010s, when Syria’s porous borders and surfeit of Islamist fighters offered fertile recruiting ground for all manner of jihadi groups. But ISIS distinguished itself by forming a self-governing state encompassing parts of Syria and Iraq that promised a return to the political expansionism of early Islam.
Though defeated, that “caliphate” has remained a central part of the Islamic State’s message, even as the group has shifted its focus more toward terrorism than nation-building.
The two suspects in the Bondi Beach shooting are known to have visited the Philippines before the attack. If investigators find that the two men underwent ISIS commando training in southern Mindanao island, that could point to a level of centralized coordination that investigators haven’t seen from ISIS in years.
The group’s activities over the past year have also shown an enduring, if dampened, public appeal.
On Tuesday, Polish authorities said they had arrested a teenager who they said had sought contact with the group and whom they suspected of planning an attack on a Christmas market.
In Michigan in October, two men were charged with plotting a mass shooting over Halloween weekend.
And almost a year ago, an ISIS-inspired American Muslim killed 14 people by driving a truck into New Year’s revelers in New Orleans.
The Islamic State has still been unable to reconstitute its so-called caliphate, a vast Islamist emirate the group ruled across parts of Iraq and Syria until it was finally destroyed in 2019. In both countries, Islamic State attacks reached historic lows in the past year.
Where the group has made strides and managed to constitute some territory is in the Sahel region of northwest sub-Saharan Africa — countries like Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger.
The Islamic State’s presence in the remote, arid and sparsely populated parts of Africa may still feel more like merely surviving than thriving to the group’s members and potential recruits.
“Even though they’re active in several African countries, it doesn’t have the same kind of ideological reverence because there is so much history in the Arab world related to Islam,” said Zelin.
And while the Sydney terror attack was lethally successful, many of the Islamic State’s attacks have been thwarted by law enforcement as multinational counterterrorism sharing has grown far stronger.
While observers have said it’s too early to say the recent attacks amount to a resurgence of the group, two relatively recent changes could help revive its fortunes. The fall of Bashar al Assad’s regime in Syria a year ago revived the country’s chaos, offering a wider opening for Islamic State.
When Syrian President Ahmed Al Sharaa — himself a former Islamist militant who once led a like-minded Al Qaeda offshoot group — joined the U.S.-led Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS last month, it painted a target on the Syrian government’s back.
Even before that, an Islamic State-claimed attack on a church in Damascus that killed at least 25 people in June once again jolted Syrian authorities’ attention to Islamic State’s threat.
Meanwhile, the group’s messaging has exploited Israel’s highly lethal war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip as a rallying cry for attacks against the West. Palestinian health officials say over 70,000 people have been killed in the war.
“I think the temperature has been turned up by the conflict in Gaza over the past two years,” said Colin P. Clarke, the executive director of the Soufan Center, a New York-based security think tank. “It’s brought in a larger swath of people who are now kind of consuming information that leads them pretty quickly through social media algorithms to extreme content.”
As much of the world gathers for the end-of-year religious holidays, Islamic State commandos — whether self-annointed or directed by its leadership — are taking notice as well.
The group has targeted religious festivities in the past, and analysts warned that another spectacular assault against Christian, Jewish or Muslim targets could give the Islamic State the publicity boost it needs for a more deadly and influential 2026.
“These are big times when they might try to do stuff,” Clarke said. “If they can do stuff again quickly, that would be monumental for them, because they haven’t been able to do stuff like that in years.”
