The discovery of two “homemade” Islamic State (IS) flags in a car belonging to one of the 14 December Bondi Beach shooters felt like history repeating itself. Two other horrific events this year were followed by the uncovering of evidence linking attackers to IS’s ideology. One was the Manchester synagogue attack in October, which left three dead including the attacker. Another was the New Year’s Day truck attack in New Orleans, which killed fourteen. In both cases, despite clear ideological affinity, IS itself never officially claimed the attacks. The same appears to have happened with Bondi Beach.
On 18 December, IS for the first time commented on the attack, in one of its dense weekly editorials in Arabic. It obliquely took credit for inspiring the assault, hailing Naveed and Sajid Akram as “heroes” and “lions” – but came short of claiming any operational links with the father and son. A decade ago, IS would have been far more likely to stamp its mark more explicitly on an attack as soon as possible links emerged. In this shift, there may be signs of a tactical move which reflects an evolving landscape of threats for governments around the world.
Last summer, IS began to hint that it would no longer officially claim all major attacks, because individuals’ commitment to the group could be demonstrated through a “spiritual” rather than “organisational” links. Even a remote or secret pledge to IS could be legitimate, in the group’s eyes, so long as the individual acted in line with the sanctioned messages of violent incitement. In 2024, this approach was applied to attacks in Switzerland, Serbia, and Russia’s North Caucasus republic of Dagestan.
Presently, IS’s capacities in many of its global sub-branches are diminishing. Blurring the lines between claimed and unclaimed attacks creates a kind of constructive ambiguity. Attackers, whose mental state turns out to be inappropriate to IS’s rigid worldview, can be plausibly dismissed as unaffiliated. Others, with profiles and motivations suitably in line with IS’s ideology, can be retrospectively claimed as IS-affiliated in the absence of hard organisational links. In this way, the group outsources violence and is credited only for the attacks it wants to be associated with.
IS is making use of a new type of attacker. More individuals are likely to commit terrorist acts without any meaningful link to a defined terrorist ideology. Instead, they have what some counterterror profilers call “Mixed, Unclear and Unstable (MUU) ideologies”. Of referrals to Prevent, the UK’s counterterrorism strategy, the most common “type of concern” in 2024-2025 had no identifiable ideology. The second most common group had “no ideology” but did show “other susceptibility to radicalisation”. Academic research shows that radicalised individuals with MUU ideologies are increasingly prevalent and account for an increasing proportion of individuals who are referred to de-radicalisation programmes in Europe and North America. Experts say that young people are most vulnerable to this kind of radicalisation, and that it spreads through online ecosystems.
MUU was at the centre of the UK government’s learning review in the aftermath of the July 2024 Southport stabbings. The report, released earlier this year, identified “several areas for learning to strengthen risk assessments, particularly around understanding indicators of radicalisation where a coherent ideology is not present”. Axel Rudakubana, the Southport attacker, had an internet search history which showed interest in Nazi Germany, ethnic violence in Somalia and Rwanda, slavery, and genocide. He also had downloaded an al-Qaeda training manual.
The UK government is playing catch-up with these evolving threats. Labour has reportedly toyed with updating the definition of “extremism”, a term with important legal and policy implications. The present definition has changed little since its creation in the 2011 Prevent Strategy: itself a legacy of the war on terror and the domestic threat of organised Islamist extremism. Recently, it has been suggested that defining extremism more closely with “behaviours of concern” rather than with “ideologies” would better capture new threats, such as those likely to be driven by MUU ideology profiles. This would more closely mirror international law which focuses on “conduct”. However, critics say that a wider scope might lead to dangerous overreach, applying the label to groups as divergent as violent environmentalists, misogynists, and members of the “manosphere”.
As communities continue to feel the awful repercussions of Bondi, governments will be asking themselves what they can do to keep people safer. The surviving suspect, Naveed Akram (24 years old) was a follower of Sydney’s infamous jihadist preacher Wisam Haddad, according to Australian counterterrorism officials. Australia’s domestic intelligence agency was aware of Akram’s ideological path six years ago, and yet this information did not help to prevent the events of last week. A wider interpretation of extremist ideology which focuses on “behaviours of concern” or “conduct” – and a greater understanding of more amorphous and atomised but equally dangerous MUU ideologies – might help flag up dangerous individuals in the future. And it may also help explain why IS continues to deliberately keep its options open after incidents such as Bondi.
[Further reading: Australians can no longer believe in their own exceptionalism]
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