The Bondi Beach Shooting Shows ISIS Threat in Australia and Beyond

Bruce Hoffman is the Shelby Cullom and Kathryn W. Davis senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations. 

Evidence that the Islamic State allegedly inspired the attack that killed at least fifteen people at a Hanukkah event in Australia could spur new concern about the reach of the terrorist group six years after it was defeated militarily. Australian authorities say that flags and explosive materials linked to the father and son who mounted the attack points to the influence of ISIS.

The attack comes at a time when several alleged terror plots in Europe have reportedly been foiled. The resilience of the ISIS ideology and ongoing concerns over extremist violence put an added burden on security officials to safeguard the many public events occurring at year’s end.

Australian officials say the gunmen who launched the attack on the Jewish celebration in Sydney were motivated by “Islamic State ideology.” What does this mean about the current threat of ISIS?

This linkage signals that the threat from ISIS, and the lethal ideology that both it and al-Qaeda embraces, continues even as we approach the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks. It took a ninety-country coalition five years to defeat the Islamic State after it declared a caliphate and took control of parts of Syria and Iraq. But the group has shown that it can survive, albeit in a different form (e.g., a terrorist group), and still pose a threat to global security. ISIS’s abiding anti-Western ideology and theological justification for targeting infidels (including Christians, Jews, and Muslims who do not adhere to its austere religious practice), has sustained the group from its origins in the late 1990s when it was closely allied with al-Qaeda.

This could be surprising to many given that in 2019 the Islamic State and the caliphate it had established were defeated and many of its leaders killed. But while ISIS was defeated as a governing body, the coalition involved did not eliminate the group entirely or completely undermine its ideology. Accordingly, ISIS simply reverted to its roots as a terrorist organization.

Does ISIS continue to pose a danger globally?

ISIS has demonstrated a remarkable capacity to operate globally since the defeat of the caliphate. On Easter Sunday in 2019, for example, it conducted coordinated suicide bombings in Sri Lanka that killed 269 people. In January 2024, it carried out twin suicide bombings in Iran that killed eighty-four people. Two months later, ISIS gunmen murdered 145 people at a Moscow concert. On New Year’s Day this year, a vehicular ramming attack on New Orleans’ famed Bourbon Street claimed the lives of fourteen people. And, the day before the Hanukkah attack in Australia, an ISIS operative in Syria gunned down two American soldiers along with their civilian interpreter.

What steps could Australian officials have taken to ward off such an attack?

The Australian government and police, intelligence, and security services clearly did not prioritize having sufficient police and security on hand for an annual event, held in a public place, by Sydney’s Jewish community on the first night of Hanukkah. This was despite a rising number of attacks on Jewish targets as well as reported threats amid what local Jewish leaders say have been increasing antisemitic incidents. Just weeks before last year’s celebration of Hanukkah, for example, a synagogue in Melbourne was firebombed. That incident followed the vandalism of another synagogue in that same city, arson attacks on a Jewish neighborhood and a kosher deli in Sydney, among other incidents. In March 2024, a van was found in a nearby suburb packed with explosives along with a list of Jewish targets.

Incidents of arson and vandalized continued during 2025. In August, Australia expelled Iran’s ambassador to the country after Tehran was accused of plotting additional attacks. And, less than two weeks ago, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry reported that antisemitic incidents in that country were nearly five times higher than the annual averages recorded before the October 7, 2023, attacks launched by Hamas fighters on Israel, the worst in the country’s history. Taking the threat of violence at such an event more seriously and ensuring that its Jewish community was better protected is exactly what Australian officials should have done to ward off such an attack.

Are there other extremist violence threats to watch for, and how should authorities respond?

Over the past few weeks alone, terrorist plots to attack Christmas markets in Germany and Poland have been thwarted. Police in Bavaria arrested five men for allegedly planning a vehicle ramming attack and in Poland a university student was accused of attempting to make contact with ISIS to facilitate a bomb attack on a festival market in that country. And, French authorities recently warned of a “very high” risk of a terrorist attack, specifically against Christmas markets. And, in the United States, the FBI foiled an alleged plot by left-wing extremists to carry out a series of attacks in and around Los Angeles and Orange County on New Year’s Eve.

All these incidents underscore the need for vigilance and an agile, but comprehensive, counterterrorism strategy. The Trump administration’s preoccupation with securing the border, apprehending illegal immigrants, and targeting narcotics traffickers cannot come at the expense of maintaining a focus on longstanding threats from Middle Eastern terrorists such as ISIS.

This work represents the views and opinions solely of the author. The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher, and takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.