By growing more decentralized, ISIS has become a more dangerous threat to increasingly numerous parts of the globe.
In January 2025, a pro-ISIS gunman opened fire at a Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans, sparking renewed headlines about an ISIS “resurgence.” While the group’s territorial caliphate collapsed years ago, ISIS itself did not. Instead, it adapted, splintering into decentralized offshoots that embedded themselves across regions from the Sahel to South Asia.
This evolving threat demands adaptive responses from governments worldwide, not just conventional counterterrorism organs. The tools that helped dismantle the caliphate are no longer sufficient. Drone strikes, targeted killings, and military campaigns are ill-suited to confront a decentralized network sustained by ideology. These approaches can do little to disrupt the digital ecosystems, transnational links, and local grievances that continue to fuel radicalization.
Instead, a long-term approach focused on building local resilience is necessary. This entails support for regional counterinsurgency efforts, enhanced intelligence sharing, and investments in initiatives that strengthen governance and legitimacy in vulnerable areas. Emerging cooperation between Turkey, Jordan, and Iraq offers a promising model of what pragmatic, regionally driven coordination can look like.
This approach is needed most urgently in Africa, where the Islamic State has found the space to regroup and expand. ISIS affiliates have entrenched themselves in fragile states and conflict zones, exploiting porous borders and weak governance.
In Nigeria, ISIS-West Africa Province (ISWAP) has grown increasingly sophisticated, using roadside bombs and ambushes to target military convoys in the Borno and Adamawa states. These attacks have killed dozens since early 2025. Further south, in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, ISIS-linked militants such as the ADF have escalated their violence: massacring villagers, burning homes, and attacking schools.
These are deliberate attempts to fracture communities and erode what little state authority exists. In Mozambique, attacks have increasingly targeted energy infrastructure and local officials, indicating long-term ambitions to undermine governance and economic recovery. Across these contexts, it is clear ISIS is not simply surviving; it is becoming more coordinated, more ambitious, and more threatening.
This is especially evident in the group’s push toward West Africa’s coastal regions. By gaining access to ports, ISIS-linked groups stand to transform their landlocked insurgencies into regionally embedded networks with transnational capabilities. As General Michael Langley, head of US Africa Command, has warned, these emerging coastal footholds could provide critical operational and economic lifelines for ISIS-linked militants, significantly enhancing their reach and resilience.
South Asia, too, has become a critical front in ISIS’s evolving campaign. Its regional affiliate, ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K), based in Afghanistan and Pakistan, has intensified its operations through a series of high-profile attacks targeting Taliban authorities, Shia communities, and foreign interests. Recent assaults, including suicide bombings and complex urban strikes, reflect tactical sophistication and a deliberate strategy to destabilize the region. ISIS-K increasingly presents itself as a leader of transnational jihad. In this fashion, ISIS-K routinely threatens Western interests and allies and seeks recruits from neighbouring Central Asian states.
This mirrors the trajectory observed in parts of Africa, a shift from fragmented violence to coordinated campaigns aimed at expanding influence and projecting power across borders. Until we begin to recognize these attacks as part of a wider pattern, we will continue to overlook the scale of the threat.
The threat posed by ISIS is not confined to foreign battlefields. Its influence manifests at home in the West, where it continues to inspire homegrown radicalization and lone-actor attacks. The group’s ideology persists in digital spaces and vulnerable communities, often embedded in encrypted platforms, online propaganda campaigns, and fringe networks that are difficult to monitor and track. This decentralized, ideology-driven form of violence presents a serious challenge for Western security services, which must navigate legal and resource constraints while responding to a threat that is fluid, fast-moving, and increasingly difficult to detect.
In late 2024, MI5 Director General Ken McCallum delivered the UK’s first national threat update since 2022, stating that ISIS is the threat that concerns him most. However, he also acknowledged the immense pressure intelligence services are under, stating that they are “absolutely stretched” and increasingly forced to make difficult decisions about what to prioritize.
McCallum’s remarks apply across the Western world, not just the UK. They lay bare a critical reality: we cannot simply monitor threats; we must disrupt the conditions that allow them to grow. Preventing radicalization means fewer individuals escalating into serious threats, making high-risk cases less frequent, and easing the burden on security services. Previous attempts have often fallen short, hindered by a lack of community trust and an overreliance on surveillance. Successful prevention requires more than early intervention; it demands a long-term strategy rooted in trust-building, local engagement, and tackling the conditions that allow extremist ideologies to take hold.
Such a strategy is essential for protecting young people, who are increasingly vulnerable to indoctrination, particularly online, where extremist content spreads rapidly and often goes unchallenged. Responding to this requires sustained investment in education, youth outreach, digital literacy, and equipping communities with the tools to identify and challenge extremist influence. Schools, families, religious leaders, and local authorities all have critical roles to play in building the kind of grassroots resilience that prevents radicalization before it takes hold.
If we are serious about addressing the threat of radicalization and extremism to young people and society as a whole, we need to recognize the persistent threat we face. In such a volatile security landscape, where resources are stretched thin and competing crises dominate headlines, the response must be both committed and adaptable. Ignoring the threat until it erupts on our doorstep is no longer an option. Our safety depends not on reacting to the next attack, but on preventing the conditions that make the next one inevitable.
About the Author: Ava Grainger-Williams
Ava Grainger-Williams is a Policy Fellow at the Pinsker Centre, a UK-based think tank focusing on Middle Eastern affairs and international relations.
Image: Musaib Mushtaq / Shutterstock.com.
