What Next - Is ISIS Back? Or Did It Never Leave?
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 6 January 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Though their physical caliphate has been gone for more than five years, the terrorist organization ISIS has survived—through propaganda, in chatrooms, and as an inspiration and cheerleader for actions like the New Years’ Eve attack in New Orleans.
Guest: Colin P. Clarke, Director of Research at The Soufan Group, a nonprofit research group focusing on global security, author of “After the Caliphate: The Islamic State and the Future Terrorist Diaspora.”
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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme and Rob Gunther.
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Transcript
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| 0:36.5 | On New Year's Day, it did not take long for Colin Clark to start getting calls about what was happening in New Orleans, that early morning attack on New Year's revelers. |
| 0:47.8 | I have a team of researchers that I work alongside of that pretty much are, I guess, what the younger generation |
| 0:55.0 | will call extremely online. |
| 0:58.4 | And they're in a lot of telegram chat rooms and all the places where the bad guys are. |
| 1:03.6 | But I pretty much get a wave of text messages as soon as something terrible happens in the world. |
| 1:13.6 | Colin is the director of research at the Sufant Group, |
| 1:16.6 | a global security research nonprofit. |
| 1:19.6 | I wanted him to go through the images with me. |
| 1:23.6 | There are so many cameras in and around Bourbon Street |
| 1:26.6 | that you can see what happened, minute by minute. |
| 1:30.2 | First, a white truck navigates around police cars, then zooms down the pavement. |
| 1:36.5 | First heard these bangs and tires wheeling and looked and saw this truck start to accelerate in a high rate speed. |
| 1:46.0 | I looked up at some point and saw that there was a vehicle coming towards us on Bourbon |
| 1:54.4 | Street, realized that he had front end damage of his vehicle, and just about as soon as I realized that is when he |
| 2:05.6 | sped up and hit everyone that I was standing with. |
... |
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