Jihadist Terrorism in the United States

Alexander Palmer, Skyeler Jackson, and Daniel Byman

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Introduction

In the early morning hours of New Year’s Day 2025, a U.S. citizen from Texas named Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove a truck into a crowd of people on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing 14 people.1 Jabbar was inspired by the Islamic State, making the incident the deadliest jihadist attack in the United States since the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida.2 To better understand attacks like Jabbar’s, CSIS compiled a dataset of 740 terrorist attacks and plots in the United States between January 1, 1994, and January 1, 2025, 140 of which were jihadist attacks and plots.3

Analysis of the jihadist attacks yields three main findings. First, the frequency of recorded jihadist attacks and plots against targets in the United States has been low since the territorial defeat of the Islamic State in 2019. Between the beginning of 2020 and New Year’s Day 2025, CSIS counted 8 jihadist attacks and 10 disrupted plots—an average of about 3 attacks or plots per year. Between 2013 and 2019, jihadists conducted 27 attacks, and 46 jihadist plots were disrupted—an average of about 10 attacks or plots per year.

Second, the lethality of jihadist terrorism in the United States has fallen since the territorial defeat of the Islamic State. This decline is likely the result of a decrease in the Islamic State’s ability to inspire violence rather than a loss of operational support from international terrorist organizations, as direct Islamic State support for attacks in the United States was lacking before 2019. U.S. terrorists have proved lethal even without support from international terrorists, with facilitated attacks accounting for only about 14 percent of deaths from jihadist violence in the last 20 years.