According to the Washington Institute’s map of Islamic State activity, ISIS-linked attacks over the past year total 1,142 worldwide, causing 5,393 casualties. By Joe Adam George, Middle East ForumDigital networks have replaced territory as the Islamic State’s primary infrastructure for radicalization and violence.Last Friday, three men were arrested in Toronto and charged with hate-motivated extremism targeting women and members of the Jewish community.One of them, 26-year-old Waleed Khan, also faces terrorism charges linked to ISIS, an exceptionally violent Sunni jihadist group also known as the Islamic State.According to the RCMP, Khan allegedly conspired with “persons known and unknown” in Toronto and elsewhere in Ontario to commit murder — a chilling indication that other extremist elements could be involved.It is the third ISIS-related arrest in Canada this year, following earlier cases in Montreal and Newmarket, bringing the total number of arrested suspects linked to the group since 2023 to 23.The timing is unsettling. Days earlier, an ISIS attack in Palmyra, Syria killed three American soldiers. In Australia, an ISIS-inspired — or possibly directed — attack on a Chanukah celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach left 15 people dead.These events do not signal a sudden ISIS resurgence. They reflect a harsh reality: ISIS was never defeated. It has adapted, endured and remains a tenacious counterterrorism threat with global reach.According to the Washington Institute’s map of Islamic State activity, ISIS-linked attacks over the past year total 1,142 worldwide, causing 5,393 casualties.At least 383 ISIS-related arrests have already been recorded globally this year. Far from fading into irrelevance, the group continues to operate at scale, exploiting political instability, social fractures and digital ecosystems across continents.Canada is not immune. Despite its geographic distance from traditional conflict zones, it has featured prominently in ISIS’s global footprint since the Syrian civil war erupted in 2011.CSIS estimates that at least 200 individuals with connections to Canada traveled overseas to join ISIS, serving as fighters, recruiters, fundraisers and propagandists.Earlier this year, the agency warned it was “increasingly concerned” about the risk of ISIS-inspired attacks at home. One of the group’s most notorious online propagandists has been identified as a Canadian.What unites the incidents in Australia and Canada is not centralized command-and-control but a strategy ISIS has refined over the past decade: radicalization at scale through digital networks.The group’s hallmark “do-it-yourself” model allows individuals to affiliate with ISIS with minimal vetting or coordination, empowering self-radicalized “lone-wolf” actors to strike locally anywhere in the world.The result is a steady drumbeat of violence — small-scale, unpredictable and psychologically corrosive.ISIS emerged from the chaos of Syria’s civil war, where porous borders and an abundance of Islamist fighters enabled it to seize territory and briefly establish a self-proclaimed caliphate across parts of Syria and Iraq.While that territorial entity was dismantled, the caliphate remains fundamental to ISIS’s worldview and propaganda.The group has since pivoted from governance to global carnage, weaponizing grievances and exploiting flashpoints — particularly Israel’s war against Hamas — to incite violence against Western targets.The Islamic State’s South Asian affiliate, ISIS-K, has become especially aggressive, ramping up online propaganda urging attacks in western countries.The group is also experimenting with artificial intelligence to amplify and personalize its messaging.Recent arrests in Canada reflect this shift: ISIS sympathizers are younger, digitally fluent and embedded in social media platforms, gaming forums and encrypted messaging apps where propaganda, recruitment and peer reinforcement converge.Women in particular will be more vulnerable to these advances, as they are more likely to be recruited online: recent cases in Spain, Singapore and the United Kingdom have shown as much.The Islamic State understands that it no longer needs physical territory to inspire terror. Its doctrine now emphasizes speed, simplicity and proximity.That approach was laid bare last week in an editorial in al-Naba, ISIS’s official weekly newsletter, which cited the Bondi Beach attack as proof of the effectiveness of online radicalization.The editorial framed digital spaces not as auxiliary propaganda tools but as core operational infrastructure, encouraging attackers to act without formal membership or direction.More troubling still, ISIS used the attacks in Syria and Australia as a springboard to incite further violence, explicitly urging Muslim refugees in Belgium to target holiday events, synagogues and churches.For Canada, this renewed threat comes at a time when Islamist extremism is largely absent from the Carney government’s national security agenda, even as intelligence agencies warn of escalating risks.As families gather for Christmas, Chanukah and New Year’s celebrations, those vulnerabilities are heightened as last week’s federal government report cautioned. ISIS has long targeted religious holidays and public gatherings. In the early hours of New Year’s Day this year, an ISIS-inspired attacker killed 14 pedestrians in a vehicle rampage in New Orleans.A similar, spectacular attack during the festive season would deliver the momentum the group seeks heading into the new year.Taken together, last week’s arrests in Toronto and the deadly attacks in Syria and Australia underscore the need for governments to once again prioritize counterterrorism.As digital pathways to violence shorten and accelerate, understanding how radicalization occurs online — and where — must become a central focus of counterterrorism policy.The lingering appeal of ISIS cannot be dismissed as fringe or irrational. As one ISIS fighter tersely told my Middle East Forum colleague Jonathan Spyer in 2014, “We want the caliphate, something old and new, from the time of Mohammed. The Europeans created false borders. We want to break these borders.”That clarity — expansionist, uncompromising and hostile to the modern nation-state — continues to animate ISIS’s global network.The lessons from Toronto, Palmyra and Sydney are unmistakable. ISIS remains capable of bleeding the West through a thousand cuts. As a new year approaches, Canadian authorities must reassert counterterrorism as a core national security priority — before the next attack makes the point for them.The post From Toronto to Sydney, ISIS’s digital reach keeps the threat alive appeared first on World Israel News.