The recent attacks at Temple Israel, a Reform congregation in West Bloomfield, Mich., and Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., may have been inspired by the Iranian regime or the ongoing war against Iran but aren’t necessarily the result of Iranian sleeper cells, experts told JNS.
“In general, what we’re looking at is Iranian-inspired attacks, rather than Iranian-directed ones, but of course that could change,” Max Abrahms, associate professor of political science at Northeastern University, told JNS.
“We spoke of attacks like that during the heyday of Islamic State. Was it Islamic State-directed or Islamic State-inspired?” said Abrahms, who studies terrorism and the Middle East.
“But these attacks, although they can be very lethal, are not particularly sophisticated,” he told JNS. “They reflect low capability, especially in the United States, where we have very permissive gun laws. Even a single individual can kill scores of people.”
“We’re really not talking about Iran hatching and directing sophisticated attacks based on what we’ve seen so far since the war began on Feb. 28,” Abrahms said.
In the Temple Israel attack, Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, 41, rammed a truck into the synagogue and shot at security officers, who returned fire. He then shot and killed himself, according to the FBI. The Lebanese-born attacker had a brother who was a known Hezbollah commander and whom Israeli forces killed, the Jewish state said.
The gunman in the Old Dominion attack, Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, 36, was sentenced to 11 years in prison in 2017 for attempting to provide material support to ISIS and was released in 2024.
Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University professor, and senior counterterrorism and homeland security fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told JNS that “from the evidence we have that’s being reported, it looks like these are lone actors, who may have been inspired by the war and perhaps even the regime, but decided to carry out these attacks on their own.”
“No one has said anything in their investigations about any direct link back to Tehran or them being part of a command-and-control apparatus,” he said.
Hoffman thinks that more of these kinds of attacks will occur as the war continues and “we might see more overt efforts by Iran to inspire, motivate and ultimately animate people to attack the longer the war drags on and the more desperate they become.”
While U.S. President Donald Trump has said he’s not concerned that the Iran war will result in more terror attacks in the United States, Abrahms told JNS that “it’s a concern and should be a counterterrorism priority.”
“This is partly because the goal of this war is regime change, and so the regime views this war as existential to their power, if not their lives,” he said. “From their perspective, they may not see any incentive to maintain any level of restraint.”
“Iran also wants to impose the greatest costs possible for this intervention in order to deter future interventions, and so it’s doing everything that it can to inflict costs, costs on American bases, costs on the international economy,” Abrahms said.
Oren Segal, senior vice president for counter-extremism and intelligence at the Anti-Defamation League, told JNS that “the incidents at Temple Israel in Michigan and at Old Dominion have put the Jewish community and all Americans on heightened alert.”
“While the exact motives remain under investigation, there is currently no confirmed link to Iranian sleeper cells,” Segal said. “These events nonetheless underscore a broader threat: violence directed at Jewish people and other Americans, whether motivated by foreign terrorist groups or by conspiracy-driven disinformation and online threats.”
“Ongoing tensions with Iran and the spread of anti‑Jewish conspiracies increase community anxiety, and the elevated threat environment is likely to continue,” he said. “Vigilance, preparedness and strong support from law enforcement are essential.”
‘Full handle on that threat’
On March 11, Peter Doocy of Fox News asked Trump during a gaggle at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, “Have you been briefed about how many Iran sleeper cells there could be inside the U.S. right now?”
“I have been, and a lot of people came in through Biden with this stupid open border, but we know where most of them are. We’ve got our eye on all of them,” Trump said. “They came in through the open border policies of sleepy Joe Biden, one of the worst—the worst president in the history of our country, and we’ve got our eyes on all of them.”
Abrahms told JNS that he doesn’t think that the United States has a “full handle on that threat.”
“Sleeper cells by definition are clandestine,” he told JNS. “I do not believe it’s true that we know where all the sleeper cells are or who they are.”
Abrahms allowed that “it can be a good strategy for the leader of a country to try to calm the nerves of the citizenry.”
Hoffman told JNS that “in a way, we have to take the president at his word.”
“On the other hand, if that’s the case, why aren’t they being rounded up now before they can commit an act of terrorism?” he said. “Historically, there have been sleeper cells in Europe and in the United States.”
The question is whether the cells remain active. “At least the pattern over the past decade-and-a-half has been for Iran not to activate these sleeper cells,” Hoffman said.
“Sleeper cells can be put in place for years, but they may also erode in their commitment to carrying out violence,” he told JNS. “They run the risk of becoming comfortable in their adopted homeland, put down roots and families, and not necessarily want to violate it.”
“We just don’t know their existence, how closely tied they still are, what their part in an Iranian command-and-control chain is,” he said. “It’s a lot of unknowns.”
