How ISIS Capitalizes on Lone Wolves to Spread Terror ‘At No Cost’

ISIS' claim of responsibility for the shooting in Garland, Texas, was proof of its effectiveness at capitalizing on so-called lone wolf attacks — even when it has no hand in planning or paying for them, experts said Tuesday.

ISIS provided no evidence to support its claim after the shooting on Sunday at a Prophet Muhammad cartoon contest. But experts told NBC News that accepting responsibility was a cheap way for the militants to achieve their terrorist goals.

“Lone wolves are a low-cost, low-resource way to carry out attacks, where the group can then retroactively decide if it wants to claim responsibility or not,” said J.M. Berger, co-author of “ISIS: The State of Terror” and a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution.

It was the first time ISIS claimed credit for an attack inside the United States. The White House was skeptical: A spokesman said Tuesday that it was too early to determine whether the terror group was directly involved.

The two gunmen were shot and killed by a police officer after they hit a security guard in the leg.

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ISIS has had unparalleled success, according to Berger and Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Ross said that's mostly because of ISIS' “very good social-media game.” 

Twitter and other sites are particularly effective because ISIS can use its considerable clout to issue widespread messages urging its supporters to attack. Meanwhile, other radically minded users act as a peer-pressure group to encourage possible perpetrators.

“In an act of terror, where you might be killed or spend the rest of your life in jail, you need other people to egg you on,” Gartenstein-Ross said. “This allows ISIS to effectively carry out terror attacks at no cost.”

Before the Garland shooting, ISIS claimed responsibility for — or at least praised — attacks in Sydney, Tunisia and Libya. The Texas attack appears to be “ISIS-inspired rather than ISIS-directed,” Garnstien-Ross said. “These guys didn't receive any training from ISIS.”

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