In the first hours after a terrorist attack, horror overtakes everything else. The scenes from New Orleans on Wednesday were hard to watch, starkly revealing unimaginable pain and suffering. After each incident of this kind, speculation about the motivation of the attacker quickly follows, asking whether they had accomplices and how they were radicalised.

In my book Home Grown, published in 2019, I pointed out that men who carry out these attacks are often so-called “lone wolves”, and that there are likely to have been a series of red flags before they created carnage. One of the most significant is a history of domestic abuse, leading to family breakdown and the perpetrator finding himself isolated and angry. Such men are hugely suggestible, looking for an ideology that “justifies” their rage and encourages them to act on it. Islamism, and specifically the violent brand promoted by Isis, is more than willing to provide it.

The FBI now believes that Shamsud-Din Jabbar acted on his own. The Bureau also believes he was motivated by Isis, revealing that he left behind videos in which he stated he had “joined” the group before the summer. Whether Isis had been in direct contact with Jabbar is unclear, but he appears to have been angry, broke and unstable in the run-up to the attack.

What has also emerged from his background are three failed marriages and accusations of abuse in two of them. His third wife obtained a restraining order in 2020, prohibiting him from engaging in threatening behaviour, sending obscene messages, physically harming her and their son, or denying her access to credit cards. The couple divorced a year later and Jabbar was ordered to pay child support. His first wife had sued him for support for their two daughters in 2012 while his second, with whom he did not have children, is said to have told the website TMZ that he was abusive towards her.

It’s clear from court filings that Jabbar blamed his divorces for his acute financial problems, which left him living in a run-down trailer park in Texas. Indeed, he was so angry that his original intention, revealed in a video made as he drove to Louisiana, was not to kill strangers at all. Instead, he declared that his first thought had been to invite his family to a “celebration” where he would kill them — a crime known as a family annihilation. He claimed to have changed his mind because he feared that headlines wouldn’t focus on what he called the “war between the believers and disbelievers”. Like other men who have carried out terrorist attacks, Jabbar wanted to be known as a warrior for Islam, not a failure with a grudge who murdered members of his own family.

This is a very familiar pattern. Most of the men responsible for terrorist murders in the UK in 2017 had a history of abusing women, including the Right-wing extremist who attacked worshippers leaving a mosque in Finsbury Park. Many turn to terrorism after losing access to their primary victims through separation or divorce. It’s happened so often that counter-terrorism experts argue family breakdown is a reason to reopen investigations into men previously suspected of supporting terrorist organisations.

Jabbar had been acting erratically for months before the attack, “behaving all crazy” after converting to Islam, according to his ex-wife’s husband. It is still early days in the investigation, but this looks like yet another case in which private misogynistic rage leads to public violence.

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Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.

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