The military ties of the man who carried out an attack in New Orleans on New Year's and another who died in an explosion in Las Vegas on the same day Highlight the increasing role of people with military experience in ideologically motivated attacks, especially those seeking mass casualties.
In New Orleans, police killed Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a US Army veteran, after a deadly rampage in a van that left 14 dead and dozens more injured.
It is being investigated as an act of terrorism inspired by the Islamic State group.
In Las Vegas, officials say Matthew Livelsbergeractive duty member of the US Army Special Forces, shot himself in the head in a Tesla Cybertruck filled with fireworks mortars and camping fuel canisters, shortly before it exploded in front of the entrance to the Trump International Hotel, injuring seven people.
On Friday, investigators said Livelsberger wrote that the explosion was intended to serve as a “wake-up call” and that the country was “terminally ill and headed toward collapse.”
Radicalization increases among veterans and active military
Military members and veterans who become radicalized make up a small fraction of a percentage point of the millions and millions who have honorably served their country.
But an Associated Press investigation published last year found that radicalization among both veterans and active-duty service members was increasing and that hundreds of people with military backgrounds had been arrested for extremist crimes since 2017. The AP found that extremist plots they were involved in during that period had killed or injured almost 100 people.
The AP also found multiple problems with the Pentagon's efforts to address extremism in the ranks, including the fact that there is still no force-wide system to track it and that a fundamental report on the subject It contained old data, misleading analysis, and ignored evidence of the problem.
Since 2017, both veterans and active-duty service members have been radicalized at a faster rate than people without military backgrounds, according to data from terrorism researchers at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START, the University of Maryland.
Less than one percent of the adult population currently serves in the U.S. military, but active-duty military members account for a disproportionate 3.2 percent of the extremist cases START researchers found between 2017 and 2022.
While the number of people with military backgrounds involved in violent extremist plots remains small, the involvement of active military and veterans gave extremist plots a greater chance of causing mass injuries or deaths, according to data collected and analyzed by AP and START.
More than 480 people with military backgrounds were charged with ideologically motivated extremist crimes between 2017 and 2023, including more than 230 arrested in connection with the insurrection of January 6, 2021 — 18 percent of those arrested for the attack late last year, according to START.
Get daily national news
Get the day's top news, political, economic and current affairs headlines delivered to your inbox once a day.
The data tracked people with military backgrounds, most of whom were veterans, involved in plots to kill, injure or inflict harm for political, social, economic or religious purposes.
The AP analysis found that plots involving people with a military background were more likely to involve mass casualties, weapons training, or firearms than plots that did not include someone with a military background.
This was true whether the plots were carried out or not.
The Islamic State group's jihadist ideology apparently linked to the New Orleans attack would make it an outlier in the motivations of previous attacks involving people with military backgrounds.
Only about nine percent of these extremists with military backgrounds subscribed to jihadist ideologies, the START researchers found. More than 80 percent identified with far-right, anti-government or white supremacist ideologies, with the remainder divided between far-left and other motivations.
Still, there have been a number of important Attacks motivated by the Islamic State and jihadist ideology. in which the attackers had American military backgrounds.
In 2017, a U.S. Army National Guard veteran who had served in Iraq killed five people in A mass shooting at the Fort Lauderdale airport in Florida after becoming radicalized through jihadist message boards and pledging support for the Islamic State.
In 2009, A psychiatrist and an army officer opened fire at Fort Hood, Texas.and killed 13 people and injured dozens more. The shooter had been in contact with a known al Qaeda operative before the shooting.
In the shadow of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, led in part by veterans, law enforcement officials said the threat from domestic violent extremists was one of the most persistent and pressing terrorist threats to the United States.
The Pentagon has said it is “committed to understanding the root causes of extremism and ensuring that such behavior is promptly and appropriately addressed and reported to appropriate authorities.”
Kristofer Goldsmith, an Army veteran and executive director of the Task Force Butler Institute, which trains veterans to investigate and counter extremism, said the problem of violent extremism in the military cuts across ideological lines. Still, he said, while the Biden administration tried to implement efforts to address it, Republicans in Congress opposed them for political reasons.
“They put up, you know, every obstacle they could by saying the Biden administration is calling all veterans extremists,” Goldsmith said.
“And now we're in a situation where we're four years behind where we could have been.”
During their long military careers, both Jabbar and Livelsberger served at the U.S. Army base formerly known as Fort Bragg in North Carolina, one of the largest military bases in the country. One of the officials who spoke to the AP said there is no overlap in their assignments at the base, now called Fort Liberty.
Goldsmith said he is concerned that the incoming Trump administration will focus on the New Orleans attack and ISIS and ignore that the majority of deadly attacks in the United States in recent history have come from the far right, particularly if Trump's nominee Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is confirmed.
Hegseth has He justified the medieval crusades. who pitted Christians against Muslims, criticized the Pentagon's efforts to address extremism in the ranks, and before Joe Biden's inauguration in the weeks after the January 6 attack was himself flagged by a fellow National Guard member as a possible “internal threat.”
With files from AP reporter Tara Copp in Washington, D.C.
Contact AP's global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org