How to Counter a Decentralized Islamic State |
The horrific Bondi Beach terrorist attack in Sydney, Australia, in December 2025 was carried out by two extremists inspired by the Islamic State. The attack targeted a Chabad celebration and killed 15 people, injuring dozens more. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, policymakers and security services worldwide grappled with the difficult question: How was a group that was supposedly defeated in 2019 still able to wreak havoc in a Western metropolis in 2025?
In our piece written last year for Foreign Policy following the New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans, we called attention to the highly lethal model of the Islamic State in recent years, wherein supporters use the group’s brand, tactics, and online guides to conduct attacks, often using simple, low-tech methods to unleash carnage—a franchising model leading to “inspired” rather than “directed” attacks.
The horrific Bondi Beach terrorist attack in Sydney, Australia, in December 2025 was carried out by two extremists inspired by the Islamic State. The attack targeted a Chabad celebration and killed 15 people, injuring dozens more. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, policymakers and security services worldwide grappled with the difficult question: How was a group that was supposedly defeated in 2019 still able to wreak havoc in a Western metropolis in 2025?
In our piece written last year for Foreign Policy following the New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans, we called attention to the highly lethal model of the Islamic State in recent years, wherein supporters use the group’s brand, tactics, and online guides to conduct attacks, often using simple, low-tech methods to unleash carnage—a franchising model leading to “inspired” rather than “directed” attacks.
The past year of successful and thwarted external operations confirms the threat of a globally dispersed group with strong ideological resonance beyond its territorial hot spots. Shortly after the New Orleans attack, a 23-year-old Syrian asylum-seeker killed a 14-year-old boy and injured five others in a stabbing spree in Villach, Austria, after pledging allegiance to the group following rapid online radicalization. In Germany, a Syrian asylum-seeker committed a knife attack at a Holocaust memorial in Berlin and had contact with the Islamic State, to which he sent a picture of himself before the attack. In the United Kingdom, the tragic Manchester synagogue attack caused three fatalities. The attacker called the U.K.’s emergency number to pledge allegiance to the Islamic State. In the United States, numerous plots linked to the Islamic State have been thwarted over the past year, including a planned New Year’s Eve attack by an 18-year-old in North Carolina who was radicalized online. These are but a few cases of Islamic State-inspired external operations in 2025.
In addition to these inspired attacks, the contemporary model of the Islamic State relies on its geographically dispersed global presence through its designated wilayat (provinces), overseen and integrated by the General Directorate of Provinces. The Islamic State Sahel, West Africa, Central Africa, Mozambique, Somalia, and Khorasan provinces all conducted deadly attacks in 2025.
In addition, the Islamic State’s home base branch in the Levant sought to reconstitute itself in 2025 and was responsible for nearly half of the violent deaths recorded in Syria in December 2025. So, what does an effective counterterrorism strategy look like when dealing with a terrorist threat landscape marked by globally dispersed provinces and inspired attacks outside of them?
A member of the Syrian Democratic Forces, backed by U.S. special forces, fires a rocket-propelled grenade during clashes with Islamic State group jihadis near the central hospital of Raqa, Syria, on Oct. 1, 2017. Bulent Kilic/AFP via Getty Images
A logical starting point is the counterterrorism strategy that the U.S. and partners pivoted to in the aftermath of al Qaeda’s pivot to a franchise-based model in 2003. While we........