Front Burner - Bondi Beach and the ISIS connection

Episode Date: December 19, 2025

The Australian prime minister and police have said that the suspected gunmen in the Bondi Beach mass shooting at a Hanukkah event were motivated by Islamic State ideology. Australian counterterrorism officials allege the father and son received military training in southern Philippines. While it's been more than six years since the fall of the caliphate, experts like Lucas Webber say there’s been a troubling rise in Islamic State motivated activity and violence worldwide. Webber is a Senior Research Fellow at The Soufan Center and a Senior Threat Intelligence Analyst at Tech Against Terrorism. He joins us to talk about what’s known about the Bondi Beach attack, and what the evolving presence of ISIS as a decentralized terrorist network looks like.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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Funerals are underway for some of the 15 people killed in a mass shooting attack on a Hanukkah gathering in Sydney, Australia this past weekend. Thousands of mourners gathered at the funeral of Rabbi Eli Schlanger on Wednesday. To his dear, dear children, whom he loved and devoted himself to endlessly, just know that your father will always be with you. To his colleagues and friends, he was more than just another rabbi. He was a force.

And many gather to remember the youngest victim from Sunday's attack, a 10-year-old girl named Matilda. She's genuinely the most kind, caring, and compassionate young girl who brightened everyone's day with a radiant smile and infectious laugh. Meanwhile, we've been learning more about the two suspects involved. The Australian Prime Minister and police have said that the gunmen, a father and son, were motivated by Islamic State or ISIS ideology. The evidence, which has been procured,

including the presence of Islamic State flags in the vehicle that has been seized, are a part of that. Well, it's been over six years now since the fall of the Caliphate and when ISIS dominated the headlines. Experts like Lucas Weber say that there has been a troubling rise over the last couple of years in Islamic State motivated activity worldwide. He is a senior research fellow at the Sufant Center and a senior threat intelligence analyst at Tech Against Terrorism. So we have him here today to talk about the details that we're learning about the Bondi Beach attack, what they tell us about the potential for more attacks like it, and what the evolving presence of ISIS as a decentralized terrorist network looks like now.

Lucas, hi, thank you so much for coming on to the show. I'm glad to be here. Thank you for inviting me. Let's first run through what we're learning about the suspects. They are 50-year-old Sajid Akram and his 24-year-old Australian-born son, Naveed Akram. Sajid was fatally shot on scene. Naveed was critically injured and hospitalized. Now it's Naveed's car, the son, where police say they found two homemade ISIS flags.

Police have charged the surviving suspect with 59 offenses, including 15 counts of murder and one count of committing a terrorist act. And what else have authorities revealed about the younger suspects possible links to extremism? I understand that he was investigated in 2019, right? Yes, Navid was investigated by ASIO in 2019. And he came to the attention of Australian security in, intelligence organization in 2019 because of alleged associations with a Sydney-based Islamic state network. It seems that open source reporting kind of indicates that as a teenager,

Navid had connection to a pro-IS milieu in Sydney. He regularly attended a prayer space linked to a controversial preacher with a history of violent anti-Semitic rhetoric. So there is quite a background there that would have raised red flags, but at the time they investigated and deemed him to not be an imminent threat. The father, Sijid Akram, originally from India, arrived in Australia in 1998 on a student visa, and since then he remained in the country with a resident visa. And he was a licensed gun owner, right? It's worth pointing out that Australia's gun laws are quite strict already. Yeah. So essentially, the The weapons were obtained legally by the father, the firearms that were used in the attacks.

They went through a legal process to obtain them. It seems they had some components placed on them, like a scope. Right. What do you make of the firearms used to carry out the attack? Like, they're not semi-automatic guns like we've seen in other mass shootings like this. No, but it seems that, and it was reported that the son had actually trained at a shooting range. And when we look at the video from the attack, he was quite savvy and he really knew what he was doing. So that explains kind of the high death toll and casualty count because in many cases when on-trained attackers passed IS attacks using guns, the kind of fatality rate is low and the casualty rate is usually low as well because when there's a panic and we saw them perched at a high point shooting onto the beach.

and around the vicinity, it's very difficult to hit moving targets unless you're trained and they seem to have inflicted a very high casually count in this kind of chaotic atmosphere. The authorities have also shared that the suspects traveled to the Philippines last month. Reasons why they went to the Philippines and the purpose of that and where they went when they were there

is under investigation at the moment. And Australia's public broadcaster, ABC, reported that sources are saying that they had traveled there for military-style training and just what kind of training could they have received in that part of the Philippines? Yeah, so I think it's important to say that the Philippine government has

denied at this point that there's any evidence they went to a training camp. I know there was an ABC report that said they were, they went to a, you know, they were trained at an actual camp. We're told by our counterterrorism sources that the father and son traveled there in early November to the capital, Manila, and then journeyed to southern Philippines, where we're told they participated in militant-style training. They were there till late... What we know is that the father and son traveled to the Philippines for most of November, nearly a month, and they were staying in a hotel in Davos City, which is not

too far, maybe a four or five-hour drive from where you can find IS militants operating. But the hotel said that they stayed in their room most of the time. if this is the case that they had contacts with IS militants, it would be the Islamic State East Asia province. And maybe members visited them to kind of help give advice or maybe they made shorter trips to locations outside of where they operate. This is all possibilities and speculation. There's no real evidence at this point.

I also confirm that the vehicle, which is registered to the younger, mail contained IEDs, but I also confirmed that it contained two homemade ISIS flags. You mentioned the IS province in the Philippines. Just for people who might not know anything about IS activity in the Philippines, can you just tell me more about what's happening there? Essentially, in the 2010s, ISEAP was making quite a push on Morawi, for instance, and they had a much larger footprint than they do now. Now it's with U.S. support and international support.

The Philippines military have been able to really degrade them. Now it's fragmented elements. They still have a decent amount of ranks. Maybe these two could have hooked up with wall there, but it's nothing like it used to be. But they are still very active online. For instance, my organization, Tech Against Terrorism, We often see ISEAP militants.

ISAEAP is unique as a branch in that their fighters actually have their own profiles on major social media outlets. Ones, you know, run by massive Meg, seven companies, corporations, which should be able to detect and remove these, but that's another topic. But it would be very easy to reach out and kind of make contact with these. individuals since they run, you know, their own social media accounts with their faces and their names and their locations. Have you seen, I know that you follow a lot of extremist pages and channels and stuff, after this horrendous shooting, like, did you see any reaction online? In the kind of main Islamic State channels where they post their propaganda, they have massive discussion groups, they were celebrating the attack. They still are.

They're kind of praising the Islamic State's province in the Philippines if they were involved. They're calling for more attacks. And before this interview a couple hours ago, the Islamic State Central media, they put out a new issue of their official newsletter, El Naba. And the editorial was praising the Bondi Beach attack. It was calling for more, call for more attacks against Christians and Jews. It singled out Belgium. It called for attacks on Christmas, New Year's Eve, kind of holiday events.

And this is troubling as there's been a number of plots foiled in Germany and Poland very recently against holiday events. And just more generally, recent IS plots foiled in the U.S. Prosecutors say two Michigan men were planning an attack on Halloween, similar to the 2015 ISIS attacks in Paris. Now they're releasing images of the suspects. They say buying guns and practicing shooting them at firing ranges. There's been arrests in Canada. 20-year-old Zachariah Hussein from Calgary recently pleaded guilty to sharing ISIS recruitment and bomb-making videos on TikTok and YouTube. Police raided his home and found sophisticated bomb-making instructions and an ISIS flag.

There's been an arrest in Austria all across Europe in Spain. So it's a very troubling trend. an environment we're facing at the moment. And there's going to be certainly heightened vigilance going into the holiday season. France, for instance, canceled some events or placed severe restriction on New Year's events. So there's a lot of chatter and indicators out there being picked up by intelligence and private intelligence indicating that there's an increased threat this year, probably even compared to last year, at this time, as regards the Islamic State and its supporters.

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Discover prevention tips that can help you be climate ready at keep it intact.com. Lucas, I wonder if you could try to explain to me why we've been. seeing this rise in IS activity over the last several years. After the fall of the caliphate, for instance, there was kind of less gravity there to kind of move its supporters. But one real significant development was the October 7th, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, and Israel's prolonged military response and the subsequent and enduring conflict. Within a few days of Hamas' attack and Israel's military response, there was a surge in simple tactics, stabbings, shootings, and so on in Europe immediately within that week, that

month. So what the Islamic State has done, it has leveraged the kind of hostilities stirred up by the conflict. It has tried to tap into the major grievances. The masses kind of have regarding this conflict and capitalize on this to fundraise, to recruit, to incite violence, to kind of conduct external operations on these grounds to spur momentum. So we're seeing this conflict being exploited. We're seeing Jews being targeted because, according to their justification, the Islamic State's justification, because of what Israel is doing in Gaza and so on. So this is their framing. These are their propaganda narratives and so on. And it is kind of working quite well because even my organization, when we come across plots and flag them to governments, we come across these plots online. A very, very high percentage of them involve motivations relating to this conflict.

The focus from the Islamic State on Jewish people calling for anti-Semitic violence, is this new or consistent with their ideology all along like pre-October 7th? It's consistent, but it has been greatly intensified because this is a very potent topic. And with this conflict ongoing, they want to exploit it as much as they possibly can. And so they have a, they see. a window to do this before maybe hostilities end completely, but they will still do it in the aftermath too. So I think this is a troubling trend that will continue for some time. And they're also calling for attacks against Christians as well. So they've really ramped up the kind of incitement towards religious populations, Jews being at the forefront and then Christians as well. I think we will see, unfortunately, much more of this. I just want to zoom out here.

Last weekend, two American military personnel and a civilian interpreter were killed in an ambush attack by an ISIS militant in Syria. And we had three great patriots terminated. by bad people and not the Syrian government there was ISIS, Syrian government fought by our side. I can tell you

in Syria, there will be a lot of damage done to the people that did it. They got the person, the individual person, but there'll be big damage done. As I mentioned in the intro, the caliphate there, fell in 2019, but also a year ago, so did the Assad

regime. And just what has ISIS activity looked like in Syria since then? For a while, it was quite suppressed. What we've seen in recent weeks and recent months is a drastic resurgence. So it is troubling. And it seems that IS Syria is trying to reconstitute, and they've seemingly been effective. They've taken the time to be patient, plan.

They're very determined. And now it looks like they're starting to really activate in the kind of attack on U.S. soldiers. that would likely require intelligence. It would require observation of the movements of these forces and so on. So it's very troubling. Likewise, there's a major problem with the humanitarian and detention camps in Syria, which shows IS fighters and their families. Now, we come across this a lot with tech against terrorism. We see kind of fundraising campaigns, often using cryptocurrency to try to help the IS fighters and families escape from these camps. And there are still thousands and thousands of them in these camps.

There's not much resources to kind of secure these camps. There's large smuggling networks, black market networks that are being conscripted into this, being tapped into, and we see it online almost daily on major social media platforms. And the crypto exchanges are being. done on major crypto exchanges. So that is a real problem and something that could really, really kind of explode, you know, if countries can't repatriate them fast enough before something bad really happens. There's often prison break attempts. And IS even has a campaign called Breaking the Walls campaign in which they attack with their fighters, these different

camps all across Africa and in the Middle East to try to break families and fighters for. to kind of boost their operational capacity in the region. So this is also something to look out for. So given all that we've been talking about today, this increase in activity that you've been seeing, do you think Western governments are equipped to handle the threat of more ISIS-motivated attacks? Honestly, I do not think so.

And combined with this, there's shifting resources to other domestic issues, CT resources and personnel away to other issues. There's, you know, the rise of great power competition, geostrategic competition or geopolitics, say, US, Russia, US, China and so on has become the top priority. And CT is kind of being pushed down in terms of priority. but this is being done at a time where we're seeing resurgence. We have outside the Levant several IS provinces controlling or contesting ground. We're seeing major IS networks with thousands in their ranks, controlling territory in the Sahel, the Lake Chad region, in Somalia, in Mozambique, and on and on. So we're also seeing IS become more multi-vectored in its external operations.

And so before, there was a large concentration of external operation kind of apparatus coming from Syria. But now it's coming from Pakistan. It's coming from Afghanistan. It's coming from Somalia. It's now coming from Sahel. So these are things to look for at the moment. And at a time when I'm seeing all these threats, I'm watching them recruit online. So we have Canadian foreign fighters traveling to these theaters, a major.

ISKP, which is the main external operations branch of the Islamic State, which carried out attacks in Turkey, in Iran, and in Moscow last year, one of their main English language propagandists was arrested in Canada a few months ago. And he's walking around free at the moment. So there's a lot of Canadian links and threats. And it seems that the plotters are getting younger and younger, so we have a youth radicalization problem as well. I've been finding Canadian IS supporters on gaming platforms. On a gaming platform, wow. Lucas has really, this is really chilling stuff. You know, I was watching the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, announced that he would expand hate laws to, quote, hate preachers, halt funding to arts

and research programs that support, quote, anti-Semitic activities in the wake of all of this. The government is also floating the idea of pausing the issuing of visas to any person from what they consider to be a terrorist enclave, including Gaza. And just what do you make of those measures? Do you think these actions would accurately target the source of threats like ISIS extremism?

Do you think they're a step in the right direction or the wrong one? If done correctly, yes, of course. those coming in should be screened well just so we know who they are and if they're involved in any terrorist groups but there's dangers to this because as we've seen kind of activist groups be deemed extremists there is a chance that this could be politicized and that is a very difficult thing to kind of navigate and maneuver and come up with a policy that is directly purposed to sort out and filter out extremists versus those with legal opinions in these countries that may not fit the political slant of those making the decisions.

So, yeah, there is a danger to this, but there also is a side that could work, but honestly don't have, not too optimistic. Okay. Lucas, thank you so much for this. Really appreciate it. No problem. All right, that is all for today. Front Burner was produced this week by Shannon Higgins, Matthew Almaha,

Joyce Ashen Gupta, Matt Mews, Kevin Sexton, and Mackenzie Cameron. Our YouTube producer is John Lee. Our music is by Joseph Shabbison. Our senior producer is Elaine Chow. Our executive producer is Nick McCabe-Locos, and I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you next week.