ISIS Is Back

By Noah Rothman

Monday, December 22, 2025

 

On Friday, American armed forces mounted the biggest anti-ISIS operation in years against Islamic State positions inside Syria. More than 70 targets were hit by fighter jets, attack helicopters, and rocket artillery — a mission, Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth said, that was designed “to eliminate ISIS fighters, infrastructure, and weapons sites.”

 

Ostensibly, the operation was purely retaliatory. On December 13, two U.S. soldiers and a civilian who served as an interpreter were killed, and three more U.S. service personnel were wounded, in an ISIS-affiliated ambush. “As we said directly following the savage attack, if you target Americans — anywhere in the world — you will spend the rest of your brief, anxious life knowing the United States will hunt you, find you, and ruthlessly kill you,” Hegseth wrote.

 

U.S. Central Command attributed the ambush near the Syrian city of Palmyra to a “lone ISIS gunman.” And yet, the strike package deployed against a broad array of ISIS targets on Friday suggests that the threat to U.S. interests and service members is not limited to one radicalized individual. Nor can we ascribe to overcaution the Trump administration’s expansion of a ban on travel visas to Syrians, which risks the administration’s efforts to engineer a thaw in relations with the post–Bashar al-Assad regime in Damascus. The Islamic State is reconstituting itself.

 

“I think many elements in recent years show that the organization is gaining ground,” one terrorism researcher told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “It’s boosting its capabilities, and it’s focusing on new operative models.” These remarks were based on evidence that the Bondi Beach slaughter was, at the very least, “inspired” by “Islamic State ideology.” Investigators are still looking into the prospect that the two attackers — in addition to the firearms training they had received from local Australian sources — had been privy to bomb-making and terrorism tactics training during a monthlong trip to the Philippines. (They had constructed four unused but “viable” improvised explosive devices.) It would be quite a coincidence if the father-and-son terrorist team had not had any contact with Islamist radicals in Mindanao, where an Islamist insurgency has been simmering for decades.

 

Only savvy police work spared the United States from the experience of its own Bondi Beach–like attacks. In October, two Michigan men were arrested after they allegedly scouted potential locations for a coordinated terrorist attack they planned to execute on Halloween. Attorney General Pam Bondi called it “a major ISIS-linked terror plot.” The following month, two New Jersey teenagers and another Michigan teen were arrested in connection with the Halloween plot. They were charged with stockpiling arms and ammunition, developing “their firearms skills in furtherance of an attack,” and using encrypted communications “to share extremist and ISIS-related materials that encourage attacks similar to what they planned.” Moreover, they had “pledged themselves to ISIS and were plotting acts of terrorism in our country,” then-acting U.S. Attorney Alina Habba wrote. One of the suspects was described as having shared and produced his own pro-ISIS propaganda. He also reportedly distributed “antisemitic messages advocating violence along with images and purchases consistent with preparation for attack, including a knife and sword collection, tactical gear, and images of him practicing at a gun range.”

 

Those plots are only the most recently interdicted terrorist plots that could have produced significant bloodshed. Election Day 2024, for example, might have been marred by horrific violence had law enforcement not intervened against Afghan nationals who had plotted to attack civilian targets on behalf of the Islamic State.

 

ISIS is hardly the only Islamist terrorist threat to the U.S. homeland. An updated report by the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security released this month identified 60 incidents between 2021 and the end of this year. “This includes those who’ve provided material support to ISIS, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda, who received military level training from Hezbollah and al-Qaeda, and who claimed to commit attacks because they were inspired by foreign terrorist organizations,” ABC News reported.

 

At the potential risk of one of the greatest achievements of his first term — the shattering of the Islamic State caliphate — Donald Trump deserves credit for taking the fight against ISIS to its home turf. The security environment in the West is deteriorating at an unsettlingly rapid pace. Degrading ISIS’s capacity to export radicalism and terror outside its region has once again become a national security imperative.