ISIS seeks to spread terror around the world again through its Central Asian subsidiary

Russia was attacked on Friday by terrorism with a ferocity unlike anything it had seen in the last two decades.

The self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS) claimed responsibility on Friday for the attack that left at least 133 dead at the Crocus concert hall, on the outskirts of Moscow.

The signs that ISIS jihadists were seeking to attack this country had not stopped accumulating in recent years.

Three experts, Lucas Webber, Riccardo Valle and Colin Clarke, warned this a year ago in an article in

Foreign Policy

in which they analyzed the narrative of the jihadist group.

“The war between Russia and Ukraine, and the broad support of the United States and its European allies for Ukraine;

“China’s attempts to conquer Taiwan and the tension with the United States, all of this points to the beginning of the end of an international system led by the United States,” said one of the ISIS propaganda organs in Persian in August 2022, calling for his followers to be patient and find the moment to strike their enemies, including Russia.

“God, make their wars bloody and sow discord in their hearts, pour out your wrath on them and torment them,” desired another article, that same year, in a medium linked to the central structure of ISIS in which the situation derived from Russia's invasion of Ukraine, "a war between crusaders."

This is not the first time that ISIS has committed attacks in Russia or against Russian interests: the most serious was the blowing up of a plane covering the Sharm el Sheikh-Saint Petersburg route, killing its 224 occupants in 2015. In this case it has also claimed responsibility for the massacre in Moscow, although without specifying the branch of the group that committed it—and that they operate with great autonomy.

Traditionally, eyes would turn to the North Caucasus, where decades of repression against local insurgencies have radicalized Islamist groups.

In 2015, the “Caucasus province” branch of ISIS (

Vilayat Kavkaz

) was founded, with several commanders splintered from the Caucasus Emirate, another local jihadist organization.

However, Russian operations have diminished the capabilities of the Caucasian branch of ISIS, which has been practically neutralized in the last five years: “It lacks leaders and is practically just a few cells that carry out ambushes against Russian forces,” explains Marta. Ter, specialist in Russia, Caucasus and Central Asia.

Increase in ISIS-K attacks

For this reason, and given the nationality that the Russian media attributes to the attackers—citizens of Tajikistan—most experts point towards the “Khorasan province” branch (ISIS-K or ISKP for its acronym in English).

The branch was born in 2015 from a coalition of Afghan Salafist and Taliban-affiliated groups that pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, then the most powerful jihadist group in the world.

ISIS-K gained international attention with the brutal attack at the Kabul airport that left 183 dead during the evacuation of US troops in the summer of 2021. Since then, it has waged a constant war against the new Taliban government and has also attacked foreign targets, such as the embassies of Russia and Pakistan or a hotel where Chinese businessmen stayed overnight, all of them countries that seek some recognition of the Taliban regime.

“ISIS-K is a real threat.

Security in Afghanistan has deteriorated under Taliban control and that creates a very good situation for the growth of ISIS,” says Russian analyst Andrei Kazantsev, currently at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

Or put another way, pockets of instability cause imbalance and insecurity around them.

And if a decade ago that focus was Syria and Iraq, now it is—again—Afghanistan.

But ISIS-K is not limited only to Afghanistan.

As ISIS lost territory in Iraq and Syria, its ability to organize attacks in other countries also diminished (although its militants continue to periodically attack targets in Syria, especially US-allied Syrian Kurdish militias).

That role has been inherited by ISIS-K, which has intensified its campaign of attacks in other countries.

On January 3, two suicide bombers blew themselves up in the Iranian city of Kerman, killing 94 people and wounding around 300. On January 28, two suspected ISIS-K militants entered a Catholic church in Istanbul and shot dead to one person: a massacre was avoided because, apparently, the attackers' guns jammed.

A month earlier, Austrian police had arrested members of ISIS-K.

This same March, German police thwarted a plot on their territory by a cell of the same group that planned to attack the Swedish Parliament.

And, in recent months, Russian security forces had also dismantled several ISIS-K cells targeting synagogues and churches.

Both the perpetrators of these attacks and the detained militants are mostly from countries of the former USSR, especially Tajikistan.

It is estimated that some 2,000 Central Asian Islamists traveled to ISIS-controlled territory in the Middle East during its heyday, some of whom may have escaped to Turkey (Turkish police periodically dismantle the group's networks).

In addition, jihadists have a great recruiting ground among the Central Asian émigré communities in Russia.

“Every year, thousands of Central Asian migrants, especially from Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, come to Russia to work.

They are mostly young men who work in deplorable conditions.

They are exploited, Russian society is very xenophobic and treats them badly, the police extort them... They are distanced from their families and strengthen ties with other Muslim communities and, perhaps, go to Salafist mosques.

And in this situation of vulnerability they are easy to be captured by jihadist networks,” explains Ter.

As if that were not enough, calls have been made on Russian ultranationalist channels to attack businesses linked to Central Asian immigrants.

“Immigrants from Central Asia were already the group that received the most attacks from the Russian extreme right, so now there is a danger that they will increase,” says the expert.

And this could feed back into the radicalization process.

Before Friday's attack, the United States had collected intelligence information about possible jihadist attacks in Russia.

Its Embassy in Moscow issued a public alert on March 7 asking people to avoid crowds in the next 48 hours with a message: “Extremists have imminent plans to attack large gatherings of people, including concerts, in Moscow.”

These types of alerts are not strange, since US authorities are required by law to warn their citizens around the world if they receive reliable information about possible threats.

Sometimes they are not fulfilled.

Others yes.

Russian President Vladimir Putin dismissed the US warning - conversely, Washington also did not heed Moscow's warning at the time about the danger of one of the Tsarnaev brothers, perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 - .

“The Russian authorities now consider that all threats are linked to the West and Ukraine, so they only work in that direction and have diverted resources from the fight against other threats, such as that posed by ISIS,” concludes analyst Kazantsev.

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