Attack in New Orleans, explosion in Vegas highlight extremist violence by active duty military and veterans – National

Military connections from the man who carried out the attack in New Orleans on New Year’s Day and another who died in explosion in Las Vegas on the same day highlight the increased role of people with military experience in ideologically driven attacks, especially those seeking mass casualties.

In New Orleans, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a US Army veteran, was killed by police after deadly rampage in the pickup truck in which 14 others died and dozens were injured.

It is being investigated as a terrorist act inspired by the Islamic State group.

In Las Vegas, officials say Matthew Livelsbergeran active-duty member of the US Army Special Forces, shot himself in the head in a Tesla Cybertruck packed with firework mortars and fuel canisters shortly before exploding outside the entrance to the Trump International Hotel, injuring seven people.

On Friday, investigators said Livelsberger wrote that the explosion was intended to serve as a “wake-up call” and that the country was “terminally ill and headed for collapse.”

Growing radicalization among veterans, active military members

Members of the military and veterans who become radicalized make up a tiny fraction of a percentage point of the millions upon millions who have served their country honorably.

But an Associated Press survey published last year found that radicalization among both veterans and active-duty military is on the rise, and that hundreds of people with military experience have been arrested for extremist crimes since 2017. The AP found that extremist plots they were involved in during that period killed or injured nearly 100 people .

The AP also found more problems with the Pentagon’s efforts to address extremism in the ranks, including that there is still no police-wide system to track it and that background report on the matter contained old data, flawed analysis and ignored evidence of the problem.

Since 2017, both veterans and active-duty military members have radicalized at a faster rate than people without military experience, according to terrorism researchers at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START, at the University of Maryland.

Less than one percent of the adult population currently serves in the U.S. military, but active duty members account for a disproportionate 3.2 percent of the extremist cases START researchers found between 2017 and 2022.

While the number of people with military backgrounds involved in violent extremist plots remains small, the involvement of active-duty military and veterans has given extremist plots a greater potential for mass injury or death, according to data collected and analyzed by the AP and START.

More than 480 individuals with military experience were charged with ideologically motivated extremist crimes from 2017 to 2023, including more than 230 arrested in connection with January 6, 2021, the uprising — 18 percent of assault arrests since the end of last year, according to START.

The data tracked individuals with military experience, most of whom were veterans, involved in plans to kill, injure, or harm for political, social, economic, or religious goals.

Analysis of AP found that plots involving people with military experience were more likely to involve mass casualties, weapons or firearms training than plots that did not involve someone with military experience.

This was true regardless of whether the plots were carried out or not.

The jihadist ideology of the Islamic State group, which is apparently linked to the New Orleans attack, would make it an outlier in the motives behind previous attacks involving people with military experience.

START researchers found that only about nine percent of such extremists with military experience subscribed to jihadist ideologies. More than 80 percent identified with far-right, anti-government or white supremacist ideologies, while the rest split between far-left or other motives.

However, there were a few notable ones attacks motivated by the Islamic State and jihadist ideology in which the attackers had an American military background.

In 2017, a US Army National Guard veteran who served in Iraq killed five people in mass shooting at Fort Lauderdale Airport in Florida after becoming radicalized through jihadist message boards and pledging support for the Islamic State.

2009 an army psychiatrist and officer opened fire at Fort Hood, Texasand killed 13 people, wounding dozens more. The attacker was in contact with a known al-Qaeda operative before the shooting.

In the shadow of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — led in part by veterans — law enforcement officials said the threat from domestic violent extremists was one of the most persistent and persistent terrorist threats to the United States.

The Pentagon said it is “committed to understanding the root causes of extremism and ensuring that such behavior is promptly and appropriately addressed and reported to the appropriate authorities.”

Kristofer Goldsmith, an Army veteran and executive director of the Butler Institute’s Task Force, which trains veterans to research and counter extremism, said the problem of violent extremism in the military cuts across ideological lines. Still, he said, while the Biden administration tried to make efforts to resolve it, Republicans in Congress opposed them for political reasons.

“They threw up, you know, every hurdle they could, saying that the Biden administration was calling all veterans extremists,” Goldsmith said.

“And now we are in a situation where we are four years behind on what we could have done.”

During their long military careers, both Jabbar and Livelsberger served time at the US Army base formerly known as Fort Bragg in North Carolina, one of the largest military bases in the nation. One of the officials who spoke to the AP said there was no overlap in their assignments at the base, now called Fort Liberty.

Goldsmith said he is concerned that the new Trump administration will focus on the New Orleans attack and ISIS and ignore that most of the deadliest attacks in the United States in recent history have come from the far right, especially if Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, is confirmed. .

Hegseth has justified the medieval crusades who pitted Christians against Muslims, criticized Pentagon efforts to address extremism in the ranks and ahead of Joe Biden’s inauguration in the weeks after the Jan. 6 attacks was alone flagged by a colleague from the National Guard as a possible “insider threat”.

With files from AP reporter Tara Copp in Washington, DC

Contact AP’s global research team at investigative@ap.org