The Islamic State — Khorasan Province (ISIS-K) is the largest threat in Central and South Asia and beyond. This is the unequivocal conclusion of the January 2024 report published by the UN Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring team. Meanwhile, people from former Central Asian Soviet republics, especially those from Tajikistan, whose citizens allegedly carried out the attack on Crocus City Hall, are playing an increasingly important role in the organisation's activities.
Prior to 2018, Tajikistan was the main supplier of suicide bombers for ISIS, according to a 2020 report by the OSCE Academy in Bishkek. Even representatives of Tajik law enforcement agencies have defected to ISIS (for example, the commander of the Tajikistan Ministry of Internal Affairs OMON, Colonel Gulmurod Khalimov, who had previously undergone counterterrorism training in the USA). After the collapse of ISIS in Iraq and Syria in 2014, its members fled to Afghanistan, where they joined ISIS-K and began recruiting supporters in Central Asia, according to the Soufan Centre. To that end, ISIS-K began developing an information infrastructure aimed at targeting specific ethnic and linguistic groups in Afghanistan and beyond, according to the Eurasianet news and analysis portal. While ISIS-K historically produced content in Arabic, Pashto and Dari, since 2015 it has ramped up production and distribution of propaganda materials in Uzbek, Tajik, Kyrgyz, Urdu and English. In 2016, about 5000 militants from Central Asia joined ISIS, experts at the Observer Research Foundation note.
After the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in August 2021, ISIS-K became even more active in propagating its message in Tajik and Uzbek. ISIS-K's official media centre, Al-Azaim, published two books and at least 15 audio recordings in Uzbek in 2022, and printed a book on jihad in the Cyrillic alphabet used in Tajikistan. In addition to books, the ISIS-K media centre publishes two monthly magazines and distributes videos, audio recordings, infographics and other materials, including via social media (especially Telegram and TikTok). By 2022, the UN Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team estimated that ISIS-K's strength may have reached 4000 individuals.
The fact that Tajikistan has proven to be the most vulnerable to ISIS propaganda is understandable. This is facilitated by its long unguarded border with Afghanistan, as well as their shared culture, religion and language, experts at the Observer Research Foundation highlight. This fact becomes even more understandable in the context of the civil war of 1992-1997, in which Islamists opposed the government. The war was only ended by giving the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT) seats in the government and parliament, which ensured the legalisation of Islamist forces and reduced the appeal of extremist ideology, according to a report by the OSCE Academy in Bishkek. However, in 2015, President Emomali Rahmon declared the IRP a terrorist organisation and began fighting the country's Islamisation. The authorities forcibly shaved off the 'too long' beards of 13,000 men, closed about 160 hijab shops and shut down hundreds of mosques. According to experts at The Jamestown Foundation, the systematic persecution of Islam in the most Muslim country in Central Asia (95% of Tajikistan's population is Muslim) has led to the radicalisation of the population and to the expansion of an extremist underground.
The economically inefficient Tajik autocracy fights the Islamisation of society using repressive methods, but this only leads to the radicalisation of Muslims. In terms of GDP per capita, Tajikistan ranks last in the CIS and 162nd in the world, with about 70% of the population living in rural areas. This poverty contrasts with the luxury that President Rahmon's family publicly demonstrates, including on social media, which allows ISIS-K to criticise Rahmon for his closeness to Russia, tyranny and deviation from the fundamentals of Islam, writes Carnegie Politika expert Temur Umarov.
Thus, the popularity of ISIS-K in the country can partly be seen as an echo or continuation of the confrontation that took place throughout the 1990s. At the same time, as the OSCE Academy report in Bishkek has noted, large-scale attacks inside the republic are unlikely and recruited fighters are likely to operate beyond the country’s borders.
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia, David Sidni, considers Tajiks to be ISIS-K's 'most aggressive and successful fighters'. The group's current leader, Sanaullah Ghafari (aka Shahab al-Muhajir), is an Afghan citizen and ethnic Tajik, and one of the organisation's main propagandists and recruiters is Tajik national Abu Miskin, according to the Soufan Centre. In July 2023, the Netherlands and Germany jointly arrested nine men from Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan associated with ISIS-K who were plotting terror attacks in Germany. In December 2023, German police arrested three Tajik and one Uzbek national for plotting a New Year's Eve attack on Cologne Cathedral. One of the two ISIS-K suicide bombers involved in a major attack in Iran in January 2024 was also from Tajikistan. In June 2023, a Tajik militant, responsible for recruiting and financing ISIS-K members, was arrested in Turkey.
Meanwhile, due to the inability to find employment in their home country, about one million residents of Tajikistan annually migrate to Russia for work (the Tajik diaspora of migrant workers is the second largest after the Uzbek diaspora, accounting for about 30% of official labour migration → Re:Russia: Tactical Migration). Here they face discrimination and xenophobia. According to the Levada Centre, between 2017 and 2021, the share of Russians in favour of restricting immigration rose from 57% to 68%, with 26% of those surveyed in 2021 stating they would not allow migrants from Central Asia into the country at all. Representatives of Russian law enforcement emphasises crimes committed by migrants, despite the fact that they account for only 2% of offences in the country. All this contributes to the radicalisation of some young Tajik labour migrants, who are forced to earn money in Russia despite everything. At the same time, Russia is unable to refuse labour migration, the scale of which may, according to some estimates, reach 7% of the working-age population (→ Re:Russia: The War and Labour Market).
For the past two years, ISIS propaganda 'has been fixated on Russia,' which is portrayed as having 'the blood of Muslims in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Syria on its hands,' notes Soufan Centre analyst Colin Clark. In September 2022, two employees of the Russian diplomatic mission in Kabul were killed in a terror attack for which ISIS-K claimed responsibility. In 2023, the FSB eliminated two ISIS-K fighters, natives of Kazakhstan, who were planning a terror attack in Kaluga. In the same year, five more Tajik nationals who were members of ISIS-K, were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 16 to 22 years for plotting a terror attack on the Lubyanka FSB building. In March 2024, the FSB said it had foiled an impending ISIS-K attack on a synagogue in Moscow and 'neutralised' the group's militants in the Kaluga region.
Against this backdrop, the failure of the Russian security services to prevent the terror attack at Crocus City Hall can be explained by Putin's fixation — and, consequently, that of all security forces — on the war with Ukraine, confrontation with the West and the fight against dissent within the country. By establishing ties with Islamic organisations and groups in recent years, they saw a common enemy in the West. This ideological framework determined the Russian authorities' extreme distrust of Western intelligence information, notes The New York Times, which in the case of Crocus City Hall was yet another manifestation of incompetence stemming from suspicion of independent and competing assessments and analysis. The habit of falsifying reality to suit the propagandistic view of the world was also evident in the response of the Russian authorities to the terror attack.
The success of the attacks in Moscow and Iran may prompt ISIS-K to redouble its efforts to strike in Europe. The head of the US Central Command, General Michael Kurilla, shortly before the terror attack in Moscow, said that there was a high risk of attacks coming from Afghanistan, especially from ISIS-K. German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser has called ISIS-K 'the biggest Islamist terrorist threat in Germany'. For Russia, this threat may be even more real. Scenes of public sadism towards the detainees, deliberately leaked by law enforcement agencies, could lead to new terrorist attacks, which may not be easy to prevent, given the size of the Tajik diaspora and the fact that attempts to expel or radically reduce it would have a destabilising effect on the Russian economy.