By Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens
Tuesday, April 21, 2026
It’s been more than seven years since President Donald
Trump declared victory over the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Yet the
terrorist group’s message remains a powerful tool for radicalizing the next
generation of jihadists in Western countries. Not only do the ideology and its
cheerleaders remain widely accessible, but its message of purpose, identity,
and meaning continues to find an audience in societies that many believe fail
to offer any of these.
Look no further than the case of Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, a
naturalized U.S. citizen and Islamic State supporter who on March 12 entered a
classroom of ROTC students at Virginia’s Old Dominion University and opened
fire, killing the professor, Lt. Col. Brandon Shah, and injuring two others. In
doing so, he completed a mission 10 years—and one prison sentence—in the
making. But the lethal attack also serves as a reminder that violent Islamists
in America still pose a threat despite the mixed fortunes of the international
terrorist group from which they draw inspiration and guidance.
Jalloh’s first direct involvement with jihadism—an
interpretation of Islam which prescribes violence to achieve the establishment
of an Islamic state—began in his mid-20s, during a 2015 trip to his native
Sierra Leone. He was taken there by his father, who had become increasingly
concerned about his son after he abruptly ended a nearly six-year career as a
Virginia National Guardsman, a decision Jalloh later claimed had been inspired
by the lectures of American al-Qaeda recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki. By the mid-2010s,
ISIS was the new terrorist game in town, having superseded al-Qaeda as the most
attractive choice for American extremists in large part due to the rise of its
caliphate in Iraq and Syria. Upon arriving in Sierra Leone, Jalloh found
himself in another region where the group’s influence was growing. He contacted
ISIS members in neighboring Nigeria and joined a convoy of recruits bound for a
recently established ISIS stronghold in Libya. Jalloh backed out of the convoy
before it reached Libya for reasons that remain unclear, and by late 2015 had
traveled back to the United States.
But Jalloh’s return to America was not the end of his
contact with the terror group. Online, he developed a relationship with a
well-known Syria-based ISIS plotter named Abu Sa’ad al-Sudani. Via social
media, al-Sudani would use his credibility as a member of the caliphate to
influence his followers in the West, advising and guiding them on how to carry
out attacks. In addition to Jalloh, al-Sudani was in contact with a number of
other U.S.-based jihadists, and in March 2016 he put Jalloh in touch with another
of his contacts and suggested they meet in Virginia to plan an attack.
Fortunately, this contact was an FBI confidential source, whose meetings with
Jalloh gave law enforcement a crucial early warning about the plot.
In his discussions with the informant, Jalloh spoke about
his admiration of previous American jihadist mass shooters, especially those
with a military background who targeted their fellow soldiers. A particular
hero of his was Nidal Hasan, an Army major who in 2009 killed 13 people at
Texas’ Fort Hood Army base. Through ongoing surveillance and the help of its
informant, the FBI observed Jalloh as his plot matured. It was not until his
attempt to buy an AR-15 in July 2016 that the agency could no longer risk
leaving him in the wind. Authorities arrested Jalloh a day later, and a
subsequent investigation found evidence of a plot to commit a mass shooting at
the July 4 veterans parade in Washington, D.C. He was convicted of attempting
to provide material support to ISIS and sentenced to 11 years in prison in February 2017.
Jalloh was freed early, presumably for good behavior, in
December 2024. There is little information on his activities in the time
between his release and the attack, but investigators confirmed that he was
enrolled in online classes at Old Dominion University. When he arrived on the
campus and entered the classroom, he twice checked with others in the room that
the event was related to the ROTC before shouting “Allahu Akbar” and opening
fire. His attempted mass killing was cut short by a group of students, who
subdued and killed him on the spot.
Jalloh’s attack is one of a number of recent mass
shooting plots involving jihadists in America. While plotters are commonly lone
actors, this is not always the case.
In November 2025, three men from Dearborn,
Michigan—Mohmed Ali, Majed Mahmoud, and Ayob Nasser—were charged with planning a mass shooting on Halloween inspired
by the 2015 Paris attacks, in which 10 members of a European ISIS cell carried
out a set of coordinated bombing and shooting attacks throughout the city,
killing 130 people. Two unnamed individuals have yet to be charged but were
also identified as key figures in the alleged cell. In the Dearborn plotters’
discussions on encrypted online messengers, which were monitored either by the
FBI or obtained via court order, they allegedly discussed targets including
nightclubs and gay bars. They also met in person to scout out locations and
practice firing AR-15s and other firearms they had purchased at gun ranges. The
plotters repeatedly expressed their support for ISIS and at least one was in
direct communication with ISIS members in Syria, including a detainee at the
Al-Hawl detention camp.
Perhaps even more alarming, according to court documents,
one of the unnamed plotters was in direct communication with the father of an
“Islamic extremist ideologue” based in Dearborn. The father allegedly offered
advice on when to carry out the attack. Authorities also claimed that the
plotter regularly posted lectures by the unnamed extremist ideologue son on
social media, along with works of predecessor Western jihadist preachers like
Anwar al-Awlaki.
While the documents do not name the father or his son
directly, they cite an academic study that identifies the latter as Ahmad Musa
Jibril. It is unsurprising that the plotters were fans of Jibril; he is
currently the most popular extremist preacher among American jihadist
sympathizers and has a long history of supporting jihadist violence, predating
even the 9/11 attacks. He produces hours of scholarly lectures that communicate
the core components of the al-Qaeda and ISIS ideologies, including the imperative
of establishing an Islamic state, the dangers of ignoring the duty of jihad,
and the importance of cultivating and preserving a highly chauvinist,
sectarian, Sunni identity in the face of pluralist and liberal ideas found in
the West. He carefully avoids direct calls to violence and does not associate
himself with any specific group, operating instead at the boundary between
explicit incitement and ideological legitimization. Jibril’s online fans and
followers take his long lectures and splice them into TikTok- and
Instagram-friendly clips for easy consumption and dissemination.
The Old Dominion and Dearborn plots are part of a small
but notable uptick in jihadist activity in the U.S. over the last two years.
According to available data, which covers the period between 2014 and
2025, 272 people were federally charged in the U.S. for ISIS-related activity,
and, as of January this year, 225 were found or pleaded guilty. The annual
number of cases began trending down around 2019, likely reflecting the change
in fortunes experienced by ISIS in Iraq and Syria, but began to trend upward
again following the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
The appeal of ISIS between 2014 and 2019 was largely due
to its successful caliphate in the Middle East. Unlike al-Qaeda, which
presented the caliphate project as a long-term generational effort that its
members were unlikely to see in their lifetimes, ISIS successfully established
God’s rule on earth. Prospective jihadists were no longer being asked to risk
their lives for a theoretical pipe dream; the rewards were there to be reaped
immediately.
The caliphate also imbued the ISIS message with a
newfound urgency. The August 2014 takeover of the Northern Syrian town of Dabiq
carried particular symbolic weight for recruiters, as doing so is described in
the hadith, a collection of recorded “sayings” from the Prophet
Muhammad, as a crucial first step in bringing about the day of judgment. The
clock was now ticking, and Muslims could no longer wait around to decide whose
side they were on. Their chance to guarantee their ascent to heaven by
contributing to the project was now before them, and they turned it down at
their peril.
With the successful international military intervention
to break the terrorist group’s foothold in Iraq and Syria, ISIS and its message
lost some of their ideological prominence in the West. But the downward trend
in U.S. terrorism-related cases has now begun to show signs of a slight
reversal. Between 2023 and 2025, there were 8, 12, and 17 cases, respectively.
This uptick is likely to be part of the wider post-October 7, 2023, wave of terrorism across the West. The scale of the Hamas-led attack on
Israel emboldened a range of terrorist actors, while the subsequent war in Gaza
has provided them with the propaganda opportunities to highlight grievances and
take advantage of the moral outrage and polarization it has caused.
Taking a step back from the details of the ideology and
impact of current events, however, there are other, more complex social and
political reasons behind Americans’ continued attraction to jihadist ideology.
Jalloh’s own testimony in court gave little insight into
why he wished to kill Americans in the name of jihadism. Similarly, we do not
yet know many details about the individuals involved in the Dearborn plot. But
Jalloh’s praise of Nidal Hasan and Anwar al-Awlaki, and the alleged connection
of the Jibril family in the Dearborn case, help to piece some of this together.
At the core of Awlaki and Jibril’s message is an appeal to the identity of
Western Muslims seeking meaning and belonging in a modern world that many
believe fails to offer either.
In his study of the difficulties secular liberal democracies
face in providing individuals with meaning and purpose associated with firmly
rooted, well-defined identities, Francis Fukuyama points to Islamism as an
attractive modern alternative. Islamist ideology, of which jihadism is the most
violent manifestation, tells an appealing story of a chosen people with roots
going back to the time of Muhammad, guided directly by God into a glorious age
of conquest and the establishment of a morally pure utopian society overseen by
divine law. The perceived enemies of this order are viewed today as liberal,
secular societies that have ushered in an era of moral corruption and
godlessness, combined with nefarious Jewish plots to destroy Islam
specifically.
Fukuyama also says the same about the allure of modern
ultra-nationalism. While this ideology may be of a different hue than Islamism,
the underlying messages and offerings are strikingly similar. The dogma makes
an appeal to disaffected, unmoored white youth by informing them of their
membership in an inherently superior in-group with long-standing roots and by
articulating aspirations to reestablish a glorious, mythic past that was
allegedly taken from them by the forces of liberalism and Jewish power.
What Jalloh and the alleged Dearborn cell both
demonstrate is that the jihadist threat in America no longer needs a
functioning caliphate, large organizations, or even direct operational control
from abroad to remain dangerous. All it requires is a small number of
susceptible individuals, a durable online canon of ideologues and martyrs, and
a political climate that keeps grievance, identity, and moral outrage at the
fore. ISIS may have lost the territory that once made its project feel
historically inevitable, but the deeper appeal that sustained it, including the
promise of belonging, purpose, transcendence, and revenge, remains available to
all new recruits.
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