Opinion

Is the ISIS-inspired attack in New Orleans linked to the Las Vegas truck explosion?

Regardless of whether the deadly ISIS-inspired New Orleans attack is connected to the Las Vegas Cyber truck detonation in front of a Trump hotel, it remains clear that terror groups historically backed by the West are turning their benefactors into victims.
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Truck driven by man inspired by ISIS that killed over 10 in New Orleans, LA on New Year's Day 2025Laurence Fox / X

Frank
Wright
Frank Wright
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(LifeSiteNews) — In the early hours of January 1st, fifteen people were killed in New Orleans by a man who drove a truck into a crowd. The suspected killer, named as Shamsad Al-Jabbar, then died in a firefight with police with two officers being wounded in the attack.

As NBC news reported, “According to preliminary information, Jabbar had a black ISIS flag affixed to the hitch of the Ford F-150 Lightning truck.” 

President Joe Biden announced to Americans that ISIS-inspired terrorism had arrived in the United States.   

In a public address, Biden said Jabbar had posted videos on social media “indicating he was inspired by ISIS, expressing a desire to kill.”  

The FBI have released a statement saying the killer acted alone. 

As reported on Sky News, FBI assistant special agent in charge Aletha Duncan initially said that “improvised explosive devices” had been discovered, but stressed “This is not a terrorist event”:  

Duncan’s statement was followed by remarks from New Orleans Superintendent of Police Anne Kirkpatrick, who also instructs the FBI on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). 

“Kirkpatrick is a National Instructor for the FBI’s Law Enforcement Executive Association’s Leadership Training Program, where she instructs on topics including, but not limited to, Bias and Diversity, Emotional Intelligence and Leading Generations,” her entry on the New Orleans governance website reads. 

Yet images from the attack appeared to show an “ISIS” flag displayed on the back of the Ford Lightning truck, which was driven into a crowd on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street, killing at least 13 people. 

An unverified image also pictured an FBI agent photographing the flag at the scene of the attack.  

The driver has been identified as Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a U.S. Army veteran who had once deployed to Afghanistan. As the U.K.’s Daily Mail reported, Jabbar had struggled with the transition to civilian life, though had nevertheless secured a six figure salary as an IT specialist for financial firm Deloitte. 

The former U.S. Army IT specialist went on to serve as a reservist following his discharge in 2015, according to NBC News. 

In a later broadcast shown by NBC, FBI’s Aletha Duncan then confirmed the incident was being investigated as a terrorist attack. 

A second attack?

Within hours of the attack in New Orleans, a Tesla Cybertruck was reported to have exploded in a fireball outside the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas at 9 a.m. local time on January 1. 

According to accounts online, the Tesla truck was “packed with explosives” and intentionally detonated, killing the driver in the blast. The suspect in this case is Matthew Livelsberger, a 37 year old former Green Beret. 

Media sources noted that the Cybertruck’s robust construction was praised by police for having largely contained the blast. With extensive experience of combat, it is possible this knowledge informed Livelsberger’s choice of the vehicle for an attack in which he was the only casualty – a striking contrast to Jabbar’s deadly New Orleans assault. 

Connection between attacks? 

It was noted that both the Tesla truck and the vehicle used to drive into the crowd in New Orleans were rented from the same vehicle hire company, Turo. 

Catholic commentator Candace Owens has noted on Twitter that both suspects had “served at the same [US] army base” – a claim repeated by news outlets.  

According to the Brussels Morning News, the FBI is now investigating a possible connection between the two attacks. 

ISIS and Al-Qaeda backed by the US, Israel

Yet one connection has yet to be made by mainstream or independent commentators: the decades-long sponsorship of Al-Qaeda and ISIS by the United States, and its allies the U.K. and Israel. 

The new regime in Syria is led by Ahmed Al-Sharaa, known by his ISIS nom de guerre Mohammed Al- Jolani. According to the UN Security council he was appointed by the leader of ISIS to set up a branch of the terror group in that nation.   

This group, initially known as the Nusra front, received weapons from Libya shipped to Syria under Hillary Clinton’s State Department along a delivery route recorded by Seymour Hersh in 2014 as “The Rat Line.”

Successive media reports have shown how Israel has supplied, armed and even medically treated these “Syrian rebels” for many years, who the Israeli diaspora minister Amichai Chikli described last month as “offshoots of al-Qaeda and ISIS.”

Chikli said, “Despite the rebranding of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its leader Ahmed al-Shara, the bottom line is that most of Syria is now under the control of affiliates of al-Qaeda and Da’esh [ISIS]”.  

 

Following his controversial statement of the obvious, the Jerusalem Post reported that Israeli ministers had been advised not to discuss developments in Syria. 

The tortured history of regime change 

Recent reports have shown the U.K. tried to court former Syrian President Assad to fight Jolani’s ISIS in 2003, to prevent the entry of his terrorists into U.K. and U.S. occupied Iraq.  

In another twist, the French government has broken with the U.S. and U.K. led media campaign to sell Jolani and his rebranded ISIS as a “diversity-friendly” and moderate force for good.   

The French announced on December 3 they had launched airstrikes on what they called “Da’Esh” targets – the Arabic name for ISIS.  

This potential diplomatic break shows that some nations are unwilling to forget the murky history of this form of islamic extremism. Known as “Takfiris” – groups such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS label all outsiders as apostates or “Takfir” – making legitimate targets of Christians, atheists, and even other muslims.  

Decades of Western-backed jihad

This was loosely the position of Osama Bin Laden – who followed Sayyid Qutb’s belief that the world had fallen into apostasy – including the Islamic world. Bin Laden’s leadership of “mujahedin” in Afghanistan was backed by the United States – a claim reported by the BBC in 2004, and echoed in 2005 by the former Foreign Secretary of the U.K., Robin Cook. 

In 1993 Bin Laden also saw his image laundered in the press, being described in the Western media as a freedom fighter “on the road to peace” after leading an army against the former Soviet occupation.  

As “HTS” has now done in Syria under Jolani, Bin Laden made use of foreign fighters to wage jihad under Western patronage – and against its strategic enemies.  

By 2017, ISIS had become so extreme in its “Takfirism” that it was condemned by the then-leader of Al-Qaeda, Ayman Al-Zawahiri.  

The viral marketing of terror

With ISIS once more in the international spotlight, it is tragically predictable that its spectacular barbarism will once more be virally spread throughout the world. A wave of similar terrorist attacks across Europe took place during the military expansion of ISIS across Syria, including that in 2016 in Nice, France – when an Islamist militant killed 84 people by driving a large truck into a celebrating crowd.  

What is new in this process of transmission is only that this attack has taken place in the U.S.  

With this brutal assault on civilians some of the horror of regime change has come home. How much more there is in store for the populations of those nations who backed the war on terror remains to be seen.   

With “offshoots of Al-Qaeda and ISIS” placed in the international media spotlight in the role of saviors, it is unsurprising that this form of viral marketing has once more seen the hideous methods of these extremists imitated in the West. 

Whilst a connection between the incidents in Las Vegas and New Orleans is yet to be established, the modes of operation speak against a coordinated attack. One bears the hallmarks of an internationally recognized brand of terror, imported to the homeland of its major sponsors abroad. As the New Orleans Police Chief remarked, “This man was trying to run over as many people as he possibly could.”

The second seems to have had no intention of causing wider harm, and may be a symbolic gesture of protest against the incoming partnership between Trump and Musk.  

However the narrative of these events is crafted, it is unlikely in the extreme that you will be hearing more of how decades of regime change have created the monster which now stalks the marketplaces and streets of Europe and America.  

This tragic attack is a new instance of an established ceremony of death. It is a product of the same political, military, and economic culture which sells its agenda through the manufacture of “reality” through mass media propaganda and censorship.   

Marketed like any other product – through sensational imagery – this is a legacy of the cultural production of terror in the service of regime change. It is this industry which lies behind the virtuous talk of spreading democracy abroad to realize the fantasy of a globalist regime.   

What the global ambitions of our political class have brought home to Americans is the reality of the agenda of death in the age of manufactured belief. 

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