ISIS is alive and well, and targeting our largest festivities

Editor’s note: This story was updated to correct the name of an ISIS leader. We regret the error.

Any doubt that ISIS remains a pervasive threat to the West should be dispelled by last week’s cancellation of three Taylor Swift concerts in Vienna, Austria. 

With the help of U.S. intelligence agencies, Austrian authorities foiled a plot to attack the Ernst Happel Stadium, where Swift was scheduled to perform. 

Despite arresting the three alleged plotters, authorities considered it prudent to cancel the shows. Police in Ternitz (about 40 miles south of Vienna) have arrested a 19-year-old man believed to be the plot’s mastermind. 

They have not identified him, but he was born in Austria and is of Macedonian descent. Police also apprehended a 17-year-old Austrian suspected accomplice in Vienna and an Iraqi national on Friday. 

The alleged ringleader, who had pledged allegiance to ISIS, confessed that he intended to kill “as many people as possible” in a suicide attack outside the venue using knives and an improvised explosive device. Police found bomb-making materials at his home. 

An ISIS supporter carried out just such an attack in Manchester in 2017, targeting fans leaving an Ariana Grande concert. 

Concerts have become a favorite target of terrorists. In November 2015, an ISIS cell attacked a concert at the Bataclan that killed 89 people as part of a rampage through Paris. 

In March 2022, terrorists acting on behalf of the Islamic State Khorasan, the principal successor to the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, struck a Moscow concert hall, killing 145 people. 

Large gatherings of this type are extraordinarily difficult to protect. Even if the venue can be secured, the crowds entering and exiting the building represent a soft target. Bombs, guns and even knives can easily cause mass casualties. 

The alleged Vienna plotters fit the pattern of the lone-wolf terrorist that has plagued Western nations for decades. 

Lone wolves are individuals with no known group affiliation who become radicalized via the internet and social media. 

They have carried out attacks on behalf of white supremacists as well as Islamist ideology. 

On June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen killed 49 people at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida. During the rampage, Mateen went on social media and pledged allegiance to ISIS before being killed by police. 

An ISIS-inspired lone wolf killed 12 people with a truck at Berlin’s Christmas market in December 2016.  

In March 2019, another self-radicalized lone wolf murdered 51 people at two Christchurch, New Zealand mosques. 

From early 2014 through the end of 2017, ISIS controlled territory in Iraq and Syria from which it could plan and launch attacks against the West. 

ISIS founder and self-proclaimed caliph Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri (popularly known as al-Baghdadi) died in a U.S. Special Forces raid in October 2019. A month later, coalition forces liberated the last remaining ISIS territory. 

Contrary to popular belief, these losses did not destroy ISIS. 

ISIS still has approximately 2,500 fighters in Iraq and Syria. It carried out 69 attacks in March alone. It also continues in the form of cells and affiliate organizations throughout West and North Africa. 

More importantly, the Islamist ideology that spawned ISIS persists and continues to inspire adherents like the young men in Austria. 

Islamism is an extremist ideology based on an ultraconservative, exclusionary view of Islam. It maintains that Muslims must reject Western secularism, capitalism and democracy and seeks to eliminate Western influence from majority Muslim countries by violence if necessary. Islamists are often, antisemitic, anti-Christian and anti-Shi’a (the minority branch of Islam). 

Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri founded al Qaeda (Arabic for “the base”) based on Islamist ideology. In 1998, Bin Laden issued a fatwa calling on all Muslims to attack Americans wherever and whenever possible. The 9/11 attacks were the result. 

Relentless pressure from the United States and its allies has reduced al Qaeda to a shadow of its former self. U.S. forces killed both of its founders. 

However, al Qaeda-associated groups persisted. In 2004, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi created “al Qaeda in the land of the two rivers” (more commonly known as “al Qaeda in Iraq”) to oppose the American invasion. 

Coalition forces killed al-Zarqawi in 2006 and crippled his organization, but out of its ashes grew the Islamic State, which took over a wide area of Syria in Iraq in 2014. 

ISIS attracted recruits from all over the world; Europe was a fertile recruiting ground.  

Many of its members are immigrants or the children of immigrants who have faced prejudice and discrimination. They live in crowded urban areas with high youth unemployment.  

More than 5,000 of them traveled to Syria to join the caliphate. Some returned to set up terrorist cells and recruit followers. 

ISIS created a special department to train recruits before sending them home. 

These cadres carried out a wave of attacks in Europe. One group perpetrated the Paris attack of November 2015 and the Brussels bombings of March 2016. 

No one knows how many former ISIS fighters and adherents live in Europe. 

Conditions that motivated European Muslims to join the Islamic State have not changed and may have grown worse. Far-right populists have scapegoated them across the continent. The false rumor spread by social media that the alleged perpetrator of a July 29 knife attack that killed three children in Southport, Merseyside, was a Muslim asylum seeker sparked riots across Britain.

Forty-two percent of France’s nearly 6 million Muslims say they feel discriminated against, while 39 percent of their white countrymen and women consider Islam incompatible with French society. 

In Austria, where the terrorist plot against Swift concerts unfolded, Islamophobic incidents ranging from discrimination and insults to physical assault have increased dramatically since the start of the Israel-Gaza war.

If the Vienna plot were an isolated incident and the authorities were confident the threat had been neutralized, the concerts would not have been canceled. The Middle East conflict and the Olympics have increased the threat level in Europe. 

Prejudice leads to threats and attacks which encourage more prejudice. Until that cycle is broken, ISIS will have no shortage of recruits. 

Tom Mockaitis is a professor of history at DePaul University and the author of “Violent Extremists: Understanding the Domestic and International Terrorist Threat .”