Perennially, people all over the world experience the celebrations and excitement at the start of a new year.
Sadly, the scene in New Orleans, Louisiana, was much different in the early hours of January 1, 2025. As investigators continue to examine what caused a U.S. citizen to seek the deaths of as many people as possible, an uncomfortable reality cannot be ignored: America’s history of seeking to influence longstanding crises all over the world, and especially in the Middle East, continues to have implications at home.
According to the FBI, a U.S. citizen and Army veteran who lived in Texas, responsible for killing at least 15 people and injuring more than 30 others, had an ISIS flag in the truck he used to run over his victims.
When former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was overthrown last month, ISIS was seen as one of the groups on the losing end. ISIS was one of the militia groups seeking to end al-Assad’s regime, determined to see the country adopt Islamic fundamentalism. Of course, for more than a decade, the U.S. sought to undermine ISIS in the parts of the world where it was active. In 2014, then U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry wrote the following: “No decent country can support the horrors perpetrated by ISIS, and no civilized country should shirk its responsibility to help stamp out this disease.”
We will return to Iran and the U.S. below, but for now keep in mind that as much as Washington and its coalition partners tried, they could not eliminate ISIS. In fact, American officials know ISIS continues to be a legitimate threat in the Middle East and Africa. In March of last year, Ian McCary, the deputy special envoy for the global coalition to defeat ISIS, spoke in Washington, D.C. He said this: “We are clear-eyed about the continuing threat ISIS still poses and we remain highly engaged in this endeavor \[of combating it\].” Although McCary did not specifically link ISIS to threats against the U.S., the reality cannot be dismissed. Michael Erik Kurilla, commander of the United States Central Command, said in 2024 that ISIS “retains the capability and the will to attack U.S. and Western interests abroad in as little as six months with little to no warning.”
Reference(s):
cgtn.com
