For the IS, Russia is an enemy that destroyed its plans in Syria
In recent years, the IS has released several propaganda videos, saying Russians had ‘the blood of Muslims on their hands’ in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Syria; the group uses these videos to radicalise and recruit youth in Central Asian countries
In the 1990s and early 2000s, Russia witnessed a series of terror attacks, mostly by Chechen militants. One of the early promises of Vladimir Putin, who rose to power in the late 1990s, was that he would crush the terrorists and restore order.
For many Russians, the Crocus City Hall shooting of March 22 in the outskirts if Moscow, in which at least 137 people were killed, brought back memories of the period of terror. Russia claimed long ago that Chechen separatism was crushed. But today, it’s facing a new jihadist threat — the Islamic State, which has claimed responsibility for the Concert Hall attack.
According to western intelligence, the Islamic StateKhorasan (ISK), the
Afghanistanbased arm of the Sunni terrorist group, is behind the Moscow attack. Russian authorities have charged four Tajik nationals for the attack.
After the physical caliphate of the IS in Syria and Iraq was destroyed in 201518, several trained IS jihadists moved to Afghanistan, where they set up an operational base. Ever since the Taliban returned
to power in Afghanistan in August 2021, the ISK has carried out a number of attacks. In the Islamic State’s lexicon, the ISKhorasan is a wilayat, a province that covers the geographical area of Afghanistan and the Central Asian Republics.
After Friday’s attack in Moscow, the IS claimed that it was part of “a wider war between the Islamic
State and countries fighting Islam”.
Syrian intervention
The IS sees Russia as a key enemy because the Russian intervention in Syria in 2015 was one of the pivotal factors that turned the Syrian civil war in favour of the regime of President Bashar alAssad. In 2017, when the IS seized the Syrian city of Palmyra, Russia’s Wagner, along with Syrian troops, liberated the city.
The IS was founded in the midst of the Syrian civil war in 2014, and one of the early cities it captured was Raaqa in eastern Syria. It wanted to topple President Assad and capture Damascus, the seat of power of the Umayyad Caliphate. That never materialised.
Today, Russia also supports regimes in West Africa such as Mali, which are fighting different jihadist groups, including an affiliate of the IS. In recent months, the IS had released antiRussia propaganda videos, claiming that Russians had “blood of Muslims on their hands” in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Syria, referring to the past Russian interventions. The ISKhorasan is largely made up of militants from Central Asian Republics.
The ISK uses these videos to recruit radicalised Central Asian youths into its terror cells. Russia hosts hundreds of thousands of Central Asian labourers, who are targeted by the IS’s propaganda blitz.
In recent years the ISK has emerged as the most powerful branch of the IS networks. Chaos in West Asia, a base in Afghanistan and foot soldiers from Central Asia are all helping the group expand its activities. Iran was attacked in January; Russia last week, any other country in Eurasia could be the next.