Terror on Bourbon Street [Updated Twice]

At around 3:00 this morning, a man named Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar drove an electric pickup truck into the crowd on Bourbon Street, in New Orleans. He mowed down a number of pedestrians, killing at least ten [UPDATE: Fifteen have now died, with another 35 injured], and then engaged in a firefight with police officers before being shot and killed.

Vehicle attacks have become a favored tactic of Islamic terrorists because they are inherently hard to stop. In a number of areas of London, “diversity bollards” have been erected to prevent them. But in most places, as on Bourbon Street, there is no protection for pedestrians if someone deliberately drives into them.

A local FBI official initially denied that it was a terrorist attack, which is hard to understand since Jabbar was flying an ISIS flag on the back of his truck. Democratic officeholders have been at something at a loss in responding to the attack, since Jabbar used a truck rather than firearms, and they prefer not to mention the obvious Islamic connection. So they were reduced to expressing sympathy for the victims.

No doubt we will learn more about Jabbar, who apparently had a military background and may still have been in the armed forces; I am not clear on this. But given the ISIS flag, his motive is hardly a mystery, and anything additional that we learn will only be a footnote.

UPDATE: More here. The FBI is conducting an operation in Houston that they say is related to the New Orleans attack. Jabbar was from Texas. It may be worth nothing that the FBI action in Houston is taking place within a block or two of the Masjid Bilal Islamic Center.

UPDATE: It sounds like the Houston operation was carried out at Jabbar’s home, which was in a trailer park a short distance from the mosque. The neighborhood is inhabited mostly by Muslim immigrants.

MORE: Surveillance video reportedly shows multiple suspects planting explosives at various locations in the French Quarter. Those people are being sought. As far as I have seen, no explosives have actually detonated, but “At least three IEDs, which were pipe bombs wired with remote detonators, were found, sources said.”

ALSO: According to authorities, both the Ford EV pickup that Jabbar used in New Orleans and the Cybertruck that exploded outside Trump Tower in Las Vegas were rented using the Turo app. Does that suggest a connection between the two attacks? Maybe, or else perhaps Turo is widely seen by criminals and terrorists as a good way to obtain a vehicle. But–given that I, at least, had never heard of Turo until now–the coincidence does seem suggestive.

MORE: On Jabbar’s radicalization:

Dwayne Marsh, who is married to Jabbar’s second wife, told The New York Times that the suspect had begun to convert to Islam in the last year and was “being all crazy”.

Entirely predictable.

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