In 2018, Barak Mendelsohn wrote, “Bound to Fail: Transnational Jihadism and the Aggregation Problem,” where he argued that transnational jihadist groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State would continue failing to turn local victories into a lasting caliphate, allowing counterterrorism forces to contain them without costly U.S.-led interventions. Eight years later, we asked Barak to revisit his arguments.Image: Adam Jones/FlickrYour article opened with al-Baghdadi’s 2018 call for lone-wolf attacks in the West, and you argued that Islamic State-inspired attacks at that time consistently failed to generate the self-sustaining momentum al-Suri envisioned. In the years since, has individual jihad achieved anything substantial for these groups, or has it confirmed your view that uncoordinated terrorism can’t overcome the aggregation problem without territory and open fronts to anchor it?In my piece, I argued that lone-wolf jihad is of little strategic value for transnational jihadis because there has not been a sufficient number of willing participants who could make lone-wolf attacks a sustained campaign. In fact, instead of encouraging a significant number of new perpetrators, lone-wolf attacks often have little to no positive consequences for the jihadi movement beyond the casualties each attack leaves behind. This has not changed in the eight years since my article was written. For example, take the devastating 2025 attack in Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia. Horrendous as it was, the attack failed to produce a wave of immediate and widespread copycat attacks, serving, instead, as a wake-up call for authorities to increase their counter-terrorism efforts. Lone-wolf attacks probably also have less impact in the United States, where mass shootings are a regular phenomenon. However, the case of the flydubai flight reveals that a well-positioned lone wolf may carry out an attack that would produce strategic effects. Had the pilot succeeded and crashed the airplane into Ben Gurion Airport in Israel,
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In 2018, Barak Mendelsohn wrote, “Bound to Fail: Transnational Jihadism and the Aggregation Problem,” where he argued that transnational jihadist groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State would continue failing to turn local victories into a lasting caliphate, allowing counterterrorism forces to contain them without costly U.S.-led interventions. Eight years later, we asked Barak to revisit his arguments.
Image: Adam Jones/Flickr
Your article opened with al-Baghdadi’s 2018 call for lone-wolf attacks in the West, and you argued that Islamic State-inspired attacks at that time consistently failed to generate the self-sustaining momentum al-Suri envisioned. In the years since, has individual jihad…
