Five years ago this month, American-backed Kurdish and Arab militias drove Islamic State fighters out of a village in eastern Syria, the group’s last piece of territory.
Since then, the organization that after attacked the self-proclaimed caliphate in Iraq and Syria has been doing just that has evolved right into a more traditional terrorist group — a secret network of cells from West Africa to Southeast Asia engaged in guerrilla attacks, bombings and targeted killings.
None of the group’s affiliates have been as tenacious because the Islamic State in Khorasan, which is energetic in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran and goals to attack Europe and beyond. U.S. officials say the group carried out an attack near Moscow on Friday, killing dozens and injuring many others.
In January, the Islamic State of Khorasan, or ISIS-K, carried out twin bombings in Iran that killed dozens and injured tons of more during a memorial service for Iran’s former top general, Qassim Suleimani, who was targeted 4 years earlier American drone attack. .
“The ISIS threat,” Avril D. Haines, director of national intelligence, told a Senate panel this month, “remains a serious counterterrorism concern.” Most of the attacks “conducted around the world by ISIS actually occurred through parts of ISIS located outside Afghanistan,” she said.
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 as little as six months with little or no warning.” “
American counterterrorism experts on Sunday rejected the Kremlin’s suggestion that Ukraine was behind Friday’s attack near Moscow. “The modus operandi was classic ISIS,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The attack was the third concert venue in the northern hemisphere that ISIS has struck in the past decade, Mr. Hoffman said, following the November 2015 attack on the Bataclan theater in Paris (part of a broader operation that hit other targets in Paris). city) and a suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena in England in May 2017.
The Islamic State of Khorasan, founded in 2015 by disgruntled members of the Pakistani Taliban, burst onto the international jihadist scene after the Taliban overthrew the Afghan government in 2021. As U.S. troops were withdrawing from the country, ISIS-K carried out a suicide bombing at Kabul International Airport in August 2021, in which 13 American soldiers and as many as 170 civilians were killed.
Since then, the Taliban have been fighting ISIS-K in Afghanistan. According to U.S. counterterrorism officials, Taliban security services have so far prevented the group from seizing territory or recruiting large numbers of former Taliban fighters.
However, in recent years, the scope and scope of ISIS-K attacks have increased with cross-border attacks on Pakistan and growing plots in Europe. Most of these European plots were foiled, leading Western intelligence to assess that the group may have reached its lethal limits.
Last July, Germany and the Netherlands coordinated targeting of arrests seven Tajiks, Turkmens and Kyrgyz linked to the ISIS-K network suspected of planning attacks in Germany.
Three men were arrested within the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia over alleged attack plans cathedral in Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2023. The raids were linked to three other arrests in Austria and one in Germany on December 24. These 4 people were reported to have supported ISIS-K.
American and other Western counterterrorism officials say the plots were organized by low-level agents who were discovered and thwarted relatively quickly.
“So far, ISIS-Khorasan has relied largely on inexperienced operatives in Europe to try to accelerate attacks on its behalf,” said Christine S. Abizaid, head of the National Counterterrorism Center House committee in November.
But here they’re alarming symptoms that ISIS-K learns from its mistakes. In January, masked attackers attacked the Roman Catholic Church in Istanbul, killing one person. Soon after, the Islamic State through its own Amak official news agency, admitted responsibility. Turkish security forces detained 47 people, most of them Central Asian citizens.
Turkish security forces have since done so launched a mass counter-operation against ISIS suspects in Turkey, Syria and Iraq. According to him, several European investigations have shed light on the global and interconnected nature of ISIS’s finances United National report in January, when Turkey was recognized as the logistics center of ISIS-K operations in Europe.
Counterterrorism officials said the attacks in Moscow and Iran showed greater sophistication, suggesting a greater level of planning and the possibility of local extremist networks being exploited.
“ISIS-K has been focused on Russia for the last two years,” a frequent critic of 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 getting Muslim blood on its hands, citing Moscow’s interventions in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Syria.”
A major proportion of ISIS-K members are of Central Asian descent, and a big contingent of Asians live and work in Russia. Some of those people could have radicalize and could have performed a logistical function by stockpiling weapons, Clarke said.
Daniel Byman, a counterterrorism specialist at Georgetown University, said that “ISIS-K has gathered fighters from Central Asia and the Caucasus under its wing, they usually could also be chargeable for the attack in Moscow, either directly or through their very own networks.”
The Russian and Iranian authorities apparently didn’t take this case seriously enough public and more detailed private US warnings about ISIS-K’s impending attack planning or were distracted by other security challenges.
“In early March, the US government provided Russia with details about a planned terrorist attack in Moscow,” Adrienne Watson, spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said on Saturday. “We also issued a public advisory to Americans in Russia on March 7. ISIS bears sole responsibility for this attack. There was no Ukrainian involvement.”
Russian authorities announced on Saturday the arrest of several suspects in Friday’s attack. But senior U.S. officials said Sunday they were still investigating the attackers’ backgrounds and trying to determine whether they were sent from South or Central Asia for this particular attack or were already in the country as part of a network of supporters. that ISIS-K subsequently engaged and encouraged.
Counter-terrorism experts expressed concern on Sunday that the attacks in Moscow and Iran could embolden ISIS-K to redouble its efforts to strike in Europe, particularly in France, Belgium, Britain and other countries that have come under attack over the past decade. intermittently.
The UN report, which used another name for Islamic State Khorasan, said that “some people from the North Caucasus and Central Asia traveling from Afghanistan or Ukraine to Europe represent a chance for ISIL-K, which seeks to spread brutal attacks within the West.” The report said there was evidence of “current and unfinished operational plots across Europe conducted by ISIL-K.”
A senior Western intelligence official identified three main factors that could inspire ISIS-K operatives to attack: the existence of sleeper cells in Europe, images of the war in Gaza and support from the Russian-speaking population living in Europe.
One major event this summer has raised concerns among many counterterrorism officials.
“I’m worried about the Paris Olympics,” said Edmund Fitton-Brown, a former top U.N. counterterrorism official and now senior adviser to the Countering Extremism Project. “They would be a prime terrorist target.”
