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Jihadist terrorism in the United States

On 11 September 2001 nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers killed 2,977 people in New York, at the Pentagon and in a Pennsylvania field, the deadliest terrorist attack in history. In the quarter-century since, jihadist attackers have killed roughly 135 more people inside the United States, in an unbroken sequence that runs through Fort Hood, Boston, San Bernardino, Orlando, Manhattan and Bourbon Street.

New America has tracked every case since 2001, including the 479 people charged with jihadist terrorism offences in the United States, and its count of those killed by jihadists on American soil after 9/11 stood at 121 before the New Orleans attack of 1 January 2025 added fourteen more.

The attacks that killed

Section titled “The attacks that killed”
DatePlaceDeadAttacker and affiliation
11 Sep 2001New York, Arlington, Shanksville2,977al-Qaeda, 19 hijackers
5 Nov 2009Fort Hood, Texas13Nidal Hasan, army major, in contact with Anwar al-Awlaki
15 Apr 2013Boston Marathon4Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, jihadist self-radicalisation
16 Jul 2015Chattanooga, Tennessee5Mohammad Abdulazeez, military recruiting centre and reserve centre
2 Dec 2015San Bernardino, California14Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, pledged to Islamic State
12 Jun 2016Orlando, Florida49Omar Mateen, pledged to Islamic State, Pulse nightclub
31 Oct 2017Manhattan, New York8Sayfullo Saipov, Islamic State inspired, truck attack on a bike path
6 Dec 2019Pensacola, Florida3Mohammed Alshamrani, Saudi air force trainee, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula
1 Jan 2025New Orleans, Louisiana14Shamsud-Din Jabbar, army veteran, Islamic State flag on the vehicle

Two things are visible in that column of affiliations. The attacks stopped being organised abroad and became inspired from abroad: after 2001 almost every one was carried out by a citizen or legal resident radicalised online, often with no operational contact with any group. And the targets are American civilians and American servicemen, chosen for being American, in a country that is not Israel.

The comparison that gets misused

Section titled “The comparison that gets misused”

Jihadist attackers are not the only source of deadly extremist violence in the United States, and over the same period far-right extremists, including white supremacist, anti-government and anti-abortion attackers, have killed a comparable number of people. New America’s own tables show the two totals running close, and in several individual years the far-right figure was higher.

That comparison is real and belongs on this page. It also does not do what it is usually deployed to do. It is used to argue that jihadist terrorism in America is a manufactured panic, which requires ignoring that a single jihadist operation in 2001 killed more Americans than every other category of terrorism in the country combined across the entire century, and that the 49 dead at Pulse remain the deadliest attack on LGBT people in American history.

Both threats are real. A country can count two things.

The plots that did not happen

Section titled “The plots that did not happen”

The death toll understates the pressure because most cases end before an attack. Of the several hundred jihadist terrorism cases charged since 2001, the great majority were interrupted at the planning or material-support stage: the 2010 Times Square bomb that failed to detonate, the 2009 New York subway plot, the transatlantic liquid-bomb plot, the 2015 Garland attack in which two Islamic State supporters were shot before they reached the crowd.

The same is true elsewhere. Israel’s Shin Bet reported 1,040 major attacks thwarted in the West Bank and Jerusalem in 2024 alone. A record of completed attacks measures how good the defence was, not how many people wanted to attack.

Why the American record matters to this project

Section titled “Why the American record matters to this project”

Every one of those attacks happened in a country with no settlements, no checkpoints, no occupation and no Palestinians under its military administration. The Pulse nightclub was not a checkpoint. The Bourbon Street crowd was not a settlement.

When the claim is made that this violence is a response to Israel, the American ledger is one of the places it can be checked, and it fails there in the same way it fails in the Sahel, which produces more than half of the world’s terrorism deaths without any Israeli involvement at all.

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Sources

Section titled “Sources”