Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese today described the deadly terrorist attack at a Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach as being “motivated by Islamic State ideology.” But, this may be an understatement.

The father-and-son pair who carried out the attack on Sunday, killing at least 15 people and wounding 40, traveled to the Philippines last month, to an area where an Islamic State, commonly known as ISIS, affiliate is active. According to Australian media reports, the two received military training there.

That means the attack is more than just motivated by ISIS; it’s an ISIS-“directed” or at least “enabled” attack, Colin Clarke, counterterrorism analyst and executive director of the Soufan Center, told Vox. “Clearly this wasn’t just two guys sitting around reading Telegram deciding that they want to hatch a plot,” Clarke added.

The Bondi Beach massacre came a day after a gunman, believed by the Pentagon to be affiliated with ISIS, killed two US soldiers and a civilian interpreter in Syria — the first American casualties in the country since the fall of Bashar al-Assad one year ago.

The perpetrator was a member of the Syrian security forces, a grim echo of similar “green on blue” attacks, in which local forces attacked the Americans they were partnered with, that dominated the final years of US military operations in Afghanistan.

The two high-profile attacks in one weekend, coming at a time when Western governments have largely shifted attention from jihadist violence to other threats, raise the discomfiting question: Is ISIS back?

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