Friday’s bloody attack on a Moscow concert hall was claimed by the terrorist group Isis, but Russian propagandists sought to blame Ukraine.
Responsibility for the assault, in which four gunmen killed at least 133 people and incinerated the building, has been placed by the United States and other Western countries specifically on an Afghanistan-based affiliate called Isis-Khorasan, or Isis- K.
The United States had warned several weeks earlier that an attack was likely. The four main attackers arrested by the FSB on Saturday all came from Tajikistan, a Central Asian country whose citizens make up a large part of ISIS-K’s membership, according to analysts who monitor the group.
But Russian officials and state media have made few references to the ISIS claims, and President Vladimir Putin did not mention ISIS or Islamic terrorism in his first statements to the nation since the atrocity.
Instead, Putin, Russian officials and the FSB security service have repeatedly said that the attackers had been intercepted while en route to Ukraine.
“It wasn’t ISIS. It was the Ukrainians,” Margarita Simonyan, propagandist editor of the state media channel Russia Today, wrote on her popular Telegram channel. “The authors were chosen in such a way as to convince the stupid global public that it was ISIS.”
“Ukraine certainly had nothing to do with the shooting [and] explosions,” said Mykhailo Podolyak, advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Russian accusations would be used to justify “the intensification of the war”, he warned.
By linking Ukraine to the attack, Russia can stoke domestic anger against its neighbor and divert attention from gaps in its security system that have widened since the war in Ukraine.
Vera Mironova, a researcher at Harvard University’s Davis Center who studies Islamic terrorist movements in the former Soviet Union, said ISIS-K struck Moscow because it was relatively easy: “It’s a question of convenience of the objective”.
In contrast, ISIS-K has planned several attacks in Europe in recent months, but these have been foiled.
Interestingly, the attackers managed to strike while Russia was in a state of war, with its military and security services mobilised, Mironova added.
Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago, the FSB, Russia’s main internal security service, has shifted its focus, according to an analysis of official statements by the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta Europe.
Previously the FSB focused almost entirely on the Islamic terrorist threat, but as of 2022 the vast majority of its statements refer to Ukraine. Often the people accused of “terrorism” and intercepted by the FSB were Russians protesting against the war or the government, analysis by Novaya Gazeta showed.
“Putin thought his fight against Islamic militancy was over after the pacification of Chechnya,” the Muslim-majority republic that fought and lost two wars for independence in the 1990s and 2000s, said Kamal Alam, a member resident of the Atlantic Council.
Indeed, Russia has long been a target of ISIS, and this “has increased significantly following its military intervention in Syria in 2015, its subsequent involvement across Africa and its relations with the Taliban,” he said. said Lucas Webber, co-founder of MilitantWire, which produces analysis of militant activity.
ISIS-K began operating in 2015 in Afghanistan and Pakistan after the original ISIS declared a caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria.
It drew strength from militants who believed that existing groups like al-Qaeda were not uncompromising enough. The group aims to create a caliphate in Khorasan, a region that stretches across parts of the Indian subcontinent and Central Asia.
After the Taliban took power in Afghanistan following the withdrawal of NATO troops in 2021, ISIS-K became its most formidable adversary, fighting a bloody insurgency and using Afghanistan as a base for attacks elsewhere.
ISIS-K has killed hundreds of people in recent years, waging a campaign against Afghanistan’s Shiite minority and a series of assassination attempts on key Taliban leaders. Last year he attacked a political rally in Pakistan and was linked to the deadly bombings near the tomb of commander Qassem Soleimani in Iran in January.
While ISIS in Iraq and Syria has weakened in recent years, ISIS-K has developed into the “most ambitious and internationally minded branch,” Webber said.
ISIS-K launched a suicide attack on the Russian embassy in Kabul in September 2022.
“ISIS-K even launched a Russian-language propaganda wing,” Webber said. “He focused heavily on inciting supporters to carry out attacks against Russia.”
Many of these members come from Tajikistan, Mironova said, a poor country where large numbers of people travel to Russia as migrant workers.
“According to ISIS doctrine, Russia is as bad as the United States, China and Iran,” said Asfandyar Mir, a senior fellow at the US Institute of Peace. “ISIS-K believes [in] external attacks of a spectacular nature, which cause a great sensation and establish its bona fides as the leading jihadist movement in the world.”
While Russia has supported the Palestinian cause in the conflict with Israel, for groups like ISIS-K “their grievances with Russia and with Putin are long-standing,” said Hanna Notte, Eurasia director at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “I’m over Chechnya, I’m over Afghanistan.”
If confirmed, the attack on the Moscow concert hall would be the first major ISIS-K terrorist attack outside of Southwest Asia. It may be intended to raise the group’s profile and broaden its recruiting pool, said Amira Jadoon, an assistant professor in the political science department at Clemson University.
As a result, Friday’s attack may be just the latest sign that Afghanistan is once again becoming a base for global terrorist attacks, analysts say.
“There has been increased concern over the last year or so about attacks being permitted” by ISIS-K from Afghanistan, Mir said. “They wanted to demonstrate geographic reach.”