In a world marked by conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, Islamic terrorism returned to the scene last Friday in Moscow after the attack on a concert hall in the Russian capital, in which at least 137 people died. An attack that caught Russian intelligence off guard and that, despite the Kremlin’s efforts to link it with Ukrainewas claimed by the Islamic State of Khorasan, something that US intelligence also points out.
He Islamic State of Khorasan (ISIS-K, for its acronym in English) has gone unnoticed in recent years by the West, weakened since 2018 by its confrontations with the United States and the Taliban, against whom they have great enmity. However, they have never stopped being a major threat in the Middle East and to Russia. What is ISIS-K, who forms it and why is Russia one of its main objectives?
ISIS-K emerged as a branch of the Islamic State
The Islamic State is made up of a large number of subgroups, cells and agents with their own origins, united by their Sunni Islamist, fundamentalist and jihadist nature.
One of them is the Islamic State of Khorasan, which receives its name from an ancient historical region located between Iran, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan (a term out of use outside jihadist circles). Formed by radicalized militants from different areas of the Middle East, was born as a branch of ISIS in Afghanistan and began to operate in that country and in Syria, in the context of the civil war in the country.
In a short time they began to gain notoriety for their extreme brutality and their indiscriminate attacks on the civilian population and against Western, international and humanitarian objectives, including attacks on mosques in Afghanistan. Although as of 2018 they lost power due to their clashes with US forces deployed in the Middle East and with the Taliban, they have continued to be one of the most active ISIS cells in the region: a UN report in 2021 It estimated its members between 1,500 and 2,200.
American intelligence, in fact, had not lost sight of them: last March, General Michael Kurilla, of the United States Central Command, alerted Congress that The group was developing its capacity to attack in Europe and Asiaand that in six months he would be able to do it “with little or no warning,” as reported by Reuters.
Russia and the Taliban, in the spotlight
The taliban They are, since the origins of ISIS-K, one of his main enemies beyond Western countries. In fact, many of its militants are Taliban dissatisfied with the Afghan regime for not being extremist enough, as explained by Newtral.
The peace talks between the United States and the Taliban in 2020 increased the enmity between ISIS-K and the current Kabul regime, making them its main enemies. That’s where Russia comes in: ISIS-K considers the Kremlin one of the main allies of the Taliban.
It is not the only reason for ISIS-K to have Russia in its sights: the jihadists They do not forget the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the Chechnya conflictBesides of Putin’s support for Bashar Al-Assad during the Syrian civil war. In fact, the Russian president has appeared in jihadist propaganda in recent years as an enemy of Islam.
It is not the first time that Russian targets have been attacked
This is not the first time that the Islamic State attacks Russian targets: in 2015, ISIS-K claimed responsibility for an attack against a Russian plane that took off from Egypt, and in which 224 people were traveling. In 2022, they were the responsible for an attack on the Russian embassy in Kabul, where two Russian diplomats died. Already in 2021, the jihadist group attacked the airport in the Afghan capital, killing 13 US soldiers and dozens of civilians during the chaotic evacuation of the country after the US withdrawal, as explained by France 24.
For the Islamic State, Russia is “as bad as the United States, China or Iran,” explains Asfandyar Mir, a senior researcher at the United States Institute of Peace, Financial Times. That, added to a ’emancipation’ of ISIS-K from its homeland in Syria, Iran and Afghanistan towards an international terrain, has caused the group to seek actions in Western territory to promote its power and to gain notoriety within international jihadism.
