The group that claimed responsibility for Friday’s deadly terrorist attack in Moscow is the Islamic State branch in Afghanistan, called the Islamic State Khorasan Province, or ISIS-K.
ISIS-K was founded in 2015 by disgruntled members of the Pakistani Taliban, who then adopted a more brutal version of Islam. By 2021, its ranks had been roughly halved, to roughly 1,500-2,000 fighters, on account of a mixture of US airstrikes and Afghan commando raids that killed lots of its leaders.
Shortly after the Taliban overthrew the Afghan government later that yr, the group gained a dramatic second wind. While U.S. troops were withdrawing from the country, ISIS-K carried out a suicide bombing at Kabul International Airport in August 2021, which killed 13 U.S. soldiers and as many as 170 civilians.
The attack raised ISIS-K’s international profile, positioning it as a serious threat to the Taliban’s ability to control.
Since then, the Taliban have been fighting fierce battles against ISIS-K in Afghanistan. Taliban security services have thus far prevented the group from seizing territory or recruiting large numbers of bored former Taliban fighters in peacetime – one in all the worst-case scenarios presented after the autumn of Afghanistan’s Western-backed government.
President Biden and his top commanders have said the United States will conduct “over the horizon” strikes from a base in the Persian Gulf against ISIS and Qaeda insurgents who threaten the United States and its interests abroad.
Indeed, Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, head of the Army’s Central Command, told a House committee on Thursday that ISIS-K “maintains the ability and willingness to attack U.S. and Western interests abroad in just six months with little to no warning.”
ISIS clearly seeks to project its external activities far beyond its own turf. Counterterrorism officials in Europe say they’ve crushed several emerging ISIS-K plots to attack targets there in recent months.
In a January post on its official Telegram account, ISIS-K said it was behind a bombing that killed 84 people in Kerman, Iran, during a procession honoring Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, a respected Iranian commander who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2020.
ISIS-K, which has repeatedly threatened Iran over its polytheism and apostasy, has claimed responsibility for several previous attacks in the country.
And now the group has claimed responsibility for the Moscow attack.
“ISIS-K has been focused on Russia for the last two years” and often criticizes President Vladimir V. Putin in his propaganda, said Colin P. Clarke, a counterterrorism analyst at Soufan Group, a New York-based security consulting firm. . “ISIS-K accuses the Kremlin of having Muslim blood on its hands, citing Moscow’s interventions in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Syria.”
