McLEAN, Va. — Brett Holmgren got woken up early on New Year’s Day by alerts that a driver had plowed into a crowd of revelers in New Orleans.
The rampage, which killed 14 people, was the deadliest attack on U.S. soil in years and was inspired by the Islamic State group. The National Counterterrorism Center, which Holmgren leads, sprang into action to help the FBI run down information on the culprit from Texas and his plot.
It was a rare recent example of a mass attack motivated by religious extremism to hit the U.S. homeland. But it didn’t occur in a vacuum, coming at a time when a terror threat that has waxed and waned in the two decades since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks is decidedly on the rise around the world.
“We are in a period where we are facing an elevated threat environment,” Holmgren said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We faced that last year. We’re going to face it again in 2025.”
The NCTC emerged in the aftermath of 9/11 as a centralized U.S. government hub to collect and analyze data and intelligence on the international terrorism threat, providing information to the White House and other agencies to shape policy decisions and protect against attacks.
A former counterterrorism analyst and assistant secretary of state, Holmgren was named its acting director last July and intends to step aside at the conclusion of the Biden administration. At that point, new leadership under President-elect Donald Trump will grapple with managing some of the global hot spots like Syria that have vexed officials in recent months and that the NCTC has been tracking.
Holmgren cites multiple factors for why the threat is higher than before, including passions arising from the Israel-Hamas war — a conflict that he says has been a driving factor in some 45 attacks worldwide since October 2023. He also points to mass migration from the Russia-Ukraine war that has sent central Asians, some with ties to the Islamic State group, to countries including Turkey, Syria, Iraq and even the U.S.
Around the world, officials are monitoring tensions in Africa, which Holmgren called potentially the greatest long-term threat to U.S. security given that the Islamic State group has a large footprint on the continent and is investing resources there.
He says the “most potent overseas threat facing the United States” right now is the group’s Afghanistan-based affiliate, known as Islamic State-Khorasan, whose attacks include a March 2024 massacre at a Moscow theater and the August 2021 bombing that killed 13 U.S. service members and about 170 Afghans in the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
One ongoing spot of concern is Syria, where an insurgent group named Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, led a lightning offensive last month that toppled the government of President Bashar Assad.
HTS is a Sunni Islamist group that formerly had ties with al-Qaida, although its leader has preached religious coexistence since taking over in Damascus. The group has not plotted against U.S. interests in recent years and has been “the most effective counterterrorism partner on the ground,” Holmgren said.
HTS has been designated by the State Department as a foreign terror organization, a label that carries severe sanctions.
Asked whether that designation would remain, Holmgren said that was a policy decision, though he noted: “They want to be perceived as being on the right side of the international community at this time when it comes to (counterterrorism). But we will continue to evaluate not just their words but also the actions that they’re undertaking.”
In an indication of Syria’s continued instability, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told The Associated Press last week that the U.S. needs to keep troops there to prevent the Islamic State group from reconstituting, and intelligence officials in Syria’s new de facto government already have thwarted a plan by IS to set off a bomb at a Shiite shrine in a Damascus suburb.
U.S. officials, meanwhile, remain concerned about the possibility of IS gaining strength by taking over weapons left behind by Assad’s government or through a mass release of fighters who are now imprisoned.
“A large-scale prisoner release in Syria could provide a real boost in the arm for IS at a time where they have been under significant pressure,” Holmgren said.
The counterterrorism center’s focus is on international terrorism, which includes cases in the U.S. like the New Orleans rampage in which the attacker was inspired by a group from abroad. The culprit, 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar, pledged his allegiance to IS in videos he recorded just before he drove his speeding pickup truck into a crowd on Bourbon Street early on Jan. 1.
As of now, Holmgren said, there’s no evidence that Jabbar was communicating with any IS operatives overseas or guided by anyone, but given that he was a lone actor who was radicalized, “this symbolizes exactly the type of attack that we’ve warned about for some time.”
“And I think it illustrates that while we have been quite effective as a government and across administrations at disrupting plotting overseas and going after terrorist leaders, we have a lot more work to do when it comes to countering violent extremism at home, countering violent extremist propaganda abroad,” he added.
“That is ultimately what is going to be needed to prevent more attacks like the one in New Orleans,” Holmgren said.
By the same token, through vast intelligence collection, hardened defenses and overseas counterterrorism operations, the U.S. has made the risk of another large-scale attack like Sept. 11 lower than it’s ever been.
“But if we get complacent as a country,” he warned, “it will come back to bite us.”
