ISIS rises: Trump mulls his response
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Welcome to The World in 10. In an increasingly uncertain world, this is The Times' daily podcast dedicated to global security. I'm Toby Gillis, today joined by Alex Dibble. The Islamic State-inspired terror attack in New Orleans this week has fostered fears that the group is rising in the West once again. After a few years of near silence, the group has been

It is a deadly reminder of what they and their followers are capable of with relatively little planning. In the closing stages of Joe Biden's presidency, it's being seen as a warning to Donald Trump to keep a close eye on ISIS and how its increasing power in the Middle East cannot be ignored. US correspondent Josie Ensor has written about this in The Times and is our guest today. Josie, the simplicity of car attacks...

makes me wonder how ISIS have been so quiet in recent times.

Yeah, I mean, we haven't seen a car ramming attack inspired or directed by ISIS for some years. I mean, obviously, we had the car ramming incident in Germany, which wasn't linked to ISIS. But, you know, for people, for those among us that kind of monitor those things, we're kind of quietly seeing, particularly in the US, a number of arrests that the FBI is making for plots that are underway or being planned that are intercepted. So, yeah,

you know, one a month, two a month, that kind of numbers that we're seeing. In some ways, because the scale is lower and the threat hasn't been quite so high in recent years, there's been more resources that were able to look at kind of a smaller number. So what we've seen is just

Plots like this that previously would have made headlines are just kind of like emails in my inbox now. So it's not as if this threat has totally gone away. We're seeing different tactics. We're seeing different modus operandi. But for the last few years, at least, the FBI has been quite good at kind of intercepting them before they've actually happened.

Josie, your piece also talks about chatter ramping up on ISIS channels recently, not just in the West. Where have all of these ISIS members been? Yeah, so, I mean, essentially what happened is the physical caliphate was in all but name defeated in Syria and Iraq, which for a long time, because of just the vast situation,

of territory that they controlled and the fact that there were so many kind of more media savvy European and foreign fighters joining. This was, you know, quite a slick operation for a long time. They were pumping out a lot of propaganda, a lot of material. And now that's kind of been outsourced to Afghanistan and Pakistan since the physical fall of the caliphate.

But nowadays there's something like estimated to be 2,000, 3,000 fighters in Syria carrying out lots and lots of attacks. I think the number tripled in the last year upon the year before that. So what we're seeing is people are kind of going more underground. They're talking about these things in chat rooms and Telegram. And these chat rooms haven't been dormant, but they've been much quieter in recent years. And we've kind of seen a bit of an increase in the activity, these kind of darker reaches of the online world.

you know, in part reflection of the group's resurgence in places on the ground like Syria and Afghanistan. And so, you know, conversation around, you know,

This has not died down by any means. It's just been quietened, I guess, and less sort of in the view of the media as things like the Israeli conflict in Gaza has taken much of our attention in the way that kind of what's happening in Lebanon and Syria too. So it's not to say it's completely died, but for sure it's been less organized, I guess, in recent years.

I suppose some people might feel that whether ISIS is on the rise or not is immaterial. They might think if a terror attack kills people, what does it matter which group is behind it?

No, but I think there's always been a kind of grim fascination with ISIS, dating back to those horrific propaganda videos of Western journalists and hostages kneeling in the desert. And I think it's sort of now seared in the public imagination, as it were. So Islamic State is bound to get more media attention than any other group. And I think that's in part why these people pledge allegiance to the group, because essentially...

I mean, we could say almost any attack that I can think of in the last year, two years, three years has been carried out. There's a lot of like mental health issues at the center of it. So Salahuddin Jabbar, you know, he was going through his own issues, his ex-wife, he was having issues with his daughter. I think he said that, you know, his first aim was actually to kill his family, but he didn't think it would get as much attention. That's at the core of

And that's at the core of ISIS as well, that they want to kind of sow as much panic as possible. And so they carry out these attacks in the most dramatic way. And they're kind of recruiting these people either directly through these chat rooms or indirectly just through their propaganda and their messaging, knowing that, you know, resources will be needed.

redirected to Islamist terror, when, you know, not necessarily that has been the biggest threat of the last, at least Biden's presidency in the last four years. But it will be interesting to see what Trump does. Obviously, this has happened just three weeks before his inauguration, and it's kind of maybe had to refocus a lot of his attention that hadn't been on Islamist terror. So I think that's definitely part of the group's...

Thinking is to create as much attention and drama on the issue as possible. And I mean, they've achieved that. And do you think Trump will now have to put a refreshed, maybe an unplanned emphasis on dealing with ISIS, especially given their increasing power in the Middle East?

You have a very complicated picture that Trump is inheriting. I mean, Biden came into power a year after the defeat of the physical caliphate. And so this issue hasn't really troubled him for the last four years. And then you kind of have this...

sort of odd resurgence of all of the Middle Eastern problems in one go. So you have, you know, huge disenchantment with the rising death toll in Gaza. And that's a hugely mobilizing and galvanizing issue for many Muslims and beyond that, I mean, progressive groups as well. And so you have the issue of Gaza, you have the issue of Syria,

It's a very unstable, you know, patchwork of groups that operate there. So even though, you know, this rebel group has taken over, HTS is now in charge, what we saw is a kind of what had been a vacuum of power situation

What we saw was, you know, the Iranian-backed forces in Hezbollah who were fighting their own wars in Lebanon retreat from the battle against ISIS in Syria. And then what you have is, to complicate matters even more, you have this Turkish group now trying to attack the Kurdish groups that allied with the US and the UK who are trying to defeat Islamic State on the ground.

So while Trump has constantly said he has no desire to be involved in foreign wars, particularly Syria, there has been sort of murmurings that he will try to keep the kind of almost tokenistic 2,000, 3,000 American troops that are in Syria just to keep

you know, align against ISIS from expanding their territory. And obviously, as we know, there's tens of thousands of Islamic State fighters that these Kurdish forces are holding back.

In the prisons and in the camp. So, I mean, the world can't really afford a kind of an increase in the volatility in the situation. So while Trump has always said he doesn't want to be involved in, you know, blood in the sand, America has always been involved in the Middle East historically and

He has to make a decision. And I don't think it can just be to pull out all of the troops and to ignore what's happening there, because at a very baseline level, I do think Trump and his administration last time cared about the victory over ISIS. And, you know, the world can't really afford for a resurgence of ISIS in Syria and across the region. So he has a headache, basically. He has a big issue that he hasn't thought much about that will be, you know, on his list on day one.

And just briefly, Josie, is that headache helped by having had a month or so since the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria to see how ISIS responded? Or is that just not enough time to gain the sort of intelligence required to make a coherent policy?

I mean, he's been getting the same intelligence that Biden has since he became the president-elect. So in many ways, he's not kind of any more disadvantaged than Biden was. He's already announced Sebastian Gorka as his lead on counterterrorism. Gorka is, of course, the British American Hungarian who is often known to espouse quite anti-Islamic views.

So this is obviously something that Gorka and his team have been concentrating on for a long time. He might just pick up where he left off. I mean, he has...

the same resources that he did last time. So in many ways, he isn't any more disadvantaged. And, you know, if you look at what America has been doing since the fall of Assad, I mean, the day afterwards, I think they carried out hundreds of strikes against Islamic State positions, obviously, very frantically responding to movements on the ground. So, I mean, it might just be business as usual when he comes back in.

OK, Josie Ensor, thank you for joining us. That is it for today. Tomorrow's episode will be slightly different from the norm on a Saturday. We'll return to yesterday's subject, Ukraine halting the piping of Russian gas to mainland Europe, and present an extended interview with the former chief executive of Ukraine's state-owned energy company, Naftogaz, who'll tell us why Vladimir Putin's wings have been badly clipped by the decision.

For now, though, thank you for spending 10 minutes to stay on top of the world with the help of the times. See you tomorrow.

We all want to enjoy food that tastes great and is sourced responsibly. But it's not always easy to know where your favourite foods come from. McDonald's works with more than 23,000 British and Irish farmers to source quality ingredients. Becky Berry is a beef farmer in the Wiltshire countryside who supplies beef to McDonald's for its iconic burgers. I'm part of a group of farmers and we've been on a journey that McDonald's have sponsored to help us with learning more about regenerative practices...

and how that can benefit us, our farms, the people and the animals that we're producing. It's a way of McDonald's giving back to the whole industry. What we're trying to do now is move the cows from where they've eaten and they're moving into a longer, lusher pasture. And part of that reason is to help the biodiversity.

As you can see here in the long grass, we've got moths and butterflies that have just hatched out. We can hear in the hedgerows around the outside of the field the birdsong. Change a little, change a lot. Find out more about McDonald's Plan for Change on the McDonald's website.

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