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With the attack near Moscow, the terrorist group “Islamic State” is once again in the public eye. Experts have been warning about the offshoot “Khorasan Province” for months.
Unlike the general public in Germany, security experts around the world have never taken their eyes off the Islamist terrorist organization “Islamic State” (IS): after their self-proclaimed caliphate was pushed out of the areas of Iraq and Syria by multinational military operations before the corona pandemic, it seemed For several years there were hardly any terrorist attacks in which IS could credibly claim responsibility.
But the organization was never really destroyed: in 2015, the regional group “Islamic State – Khorasan Province” (ISPK), which had been founded a year earlier, appeared in Afghanistan, where it found its main rival in the Taliban, who had since come to power.
“Khorasan” is the name for a historical region that included areas of today’s states of Afghanistan, Iran, Turkmenistan and other parts of Central Asia – IS uses this name under historical revisionist principles in order to place itself in the tradition of a religiously significant region thereby legitimizing it.
Special impact power
Observers have long considered the ISPK group’s effectiveness to be significant. Its “flexibility, ability to adapt and geographically reposition” are remarkable, noted expert Antonio Giustozzi from King’s College in London in his essay “Crisis and adaptation of the Islamic State in Khorasan” published in February.
Giustozzi, who is also the author of a 2018 book about ISIS in “Khorasan,” credited the subdivision with inheriting the resilience and basic structure of its parent organization. In the essay, he attributes ISPK’s high effectiveness in spreading online propaganda and recruiting new talent, although he has financing difficulties – because fighting and ousting the Taliban from Afghanistan as a goal is unpopular in most other countries in the Gulf region.
“ISPK is probably the only IS offshoot that would currently be capable of carrying out a large, coordinated attack in the West. Its motivation is not only ideology, but also – and above all – dominance in the jihadist camp,” wrote terrorism expert Peter Neumann in the December 2023 on X. At that time, reports of attack plans around Christmas became known in several European countries.
Recruitment in Afghanistan
The group recruits young people primarily in Central Asia – according to initial findings, the trail of the Moscow attackers leads to Tajikistan, where a lack of prospects and the suppression of Islam radicalize young people – and Afghanistan. In his essay, expert Giustozzi quotes an ISPK commander as saying that students at religious schools there are particularly ideologically stable and can thus “boost the morale of other recruits.”
Information about the number of ISPK members varies between 1,500 and 6,000 – partly because the UN reports on the development of the group refer to changing information from the individual states.
However, experts agree that, unlike comparable IS subgroups active in Africa, ISPK’s activities are not primarily aimed at conquering territory, but have instead focused on carrying out attacks abroad. According to the Washington Institute for Near-East Policy, the ISPK planned a total of 21 attacks in nine different countries in 2023.
Just a week ago, two men from Afghanistan were arrested in Gera, Germany, who are said to have planned an Islamist-motivated attack on the Swedish parliament in Stockholm.
Shortly before Christmas there were three arrests of suspected supporters of the group in Austria who, according to the investigation, wanted to attack Christmas markets and New Year’s Eve celebrations.
At the beginning of January, hundreds of people were killed in an attack on a memorial ceremony for Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in the southeast of the country – here ISPK claimed responsibility.
Resentment against Moscow
Experts cite several possible reasons why Russia’s capital became a suspected target of attacks by the ISPK. On the one hand, Russia’s self-image, shaped by Vladimir Putin, increasingly relies on the myth of a Christian-Orthodox and ethnically Russian “civilization” that would have a special role in the world.
Anti-Muslim racism against people from the Caucasus and Central Asia – or against people who are assigned this origin based on their appearance – is widespread among the population; The equation of Islam with the threat of terrorism has also never been questioned by many after attacks within Russia, for example on the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow in 2002, a school in Beslan in 2004 and on the Moscow subway in 2010.
When Russia sided militarily with dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2015, he was able to largely retake Syrian territory – IS was forced out of the country and now harbors resentment against Moscow, which helped destroy its self-proclaimed caliphate.
Moscow’s relationship with Afghanistan
In addition, more than 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union into sovereign states, the Kremlin still sees itself as a kind of protective power for the Central Asian states in which there is unrest without Moscow’s supervision and intervention – this self-image was demonstrated, among other things, in the suppression of the unrest in 2022 Kazakhstan visible through CSTO troops.
The Kremlin’s relationship with the Taliban is contradictory: On the one hand, they are a banned terrorist organization in Russia – and must be referred to as such every time the Taliban are mentioned in state media. On the other hand, before the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, the Russian leadership had repeatedly met the Taliban for talks and also invited them to Moscow.
After the fall of Kabul in the summer of 2021, Moscow initially said that it had learned from the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan that it would lead to nothing to interfere too deeply in the country – and that it was not too worried about the seizure of power, as it already had communication channels the Taliban set up. If Russia’s anger is now directed at the ISPK, the consequences could also affect Afghanistan.