Washington says it warned Russia this month of imminent attack
Kabul/Peshawar:
Sanaullah Ghafari, 29, is the leader of the Islamic State’s Afghan branch and has overseen the group’s transformation into one of the most feared branches of the global Islamist network, able to operate from bases far from the Afghan border.
The Islamic State claimed responsibility for Friday’s mass shooting at a concert hall near Moscow that killed at least 139 people. U.S. officials said they had intelligence indicating that the attack was carried out by the Afghan affiliate “Islamic State in Khorasan” (ISIS-K).
Washington said it warned Russia this month of an impending attack. A source familiar with the intelligence said it was based on intercepted “chat logs” between ISIS-K militants.
Security experts say a Tajik passport found on the gunman arrested by Russian authorities suggests it may be linked to Ghaffari’s group, which actively recruits from the impoverished Central Asian country.
In recent years, the organization has also repeatedly sought to strike Russia in retaliation for Russia’s intervention in the Syrian civil war and helping to thwart the regional operations of the “Islamic State”.
Two Taliban sources in Afghanistan and Pakistan told Reuters that Ghafari was initially killed in Afghanistan last June but was wounded and crossed the border into Pakistan and is believed to be living in the lawless border province of Balochistan. Pakistan’s foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment on Ghafari’s whereabouts.
Ghafari was appointed ISIS-K emir in 2020, cementing the group’s reputation for hard-line ideology and high-profile attacks.
During the 2021 U.S. troop withdrawal, ISIS-K carried out a suicide bombing at Kabul International Airport that killed 13 U.S. soldiers and dozens of civilians, attracting global attention. In September 2022, it claimed responsibility for a deadly suicide attack on the Russian Embassy in Kabul.
But perhaps its most brazen action to date came in January, when two suicide bombings killed nearly 100 people at the memorial complex for Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander Qassem Soleimani. It was the deadliest armed attack on Iranian soil since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Little was known about Ghafari before the 2021 attack on Kabul airport, which prompted Washington to offer a $10 million bounty to hunt him down. Taliban sources said he is an Afghan Tajik who served in the Afghan army and later joined ISIS-K, which was formed in late 2014.
Reuters spoke to more than a dozen sources, including serving and retired security and intelligence officials in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and the United States, as well as Afghan and Pakistani Taliban members, who said ISIS-K has exploited the Taliban’s failures. Eliminate its safe havens in northern and eastern Afghanistan for regional expansion.
Under Ghafari, the group has used high-profile attacks as a recruitment tool, targeting ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks across Central Asia rather than Afghanistan’s Pashtun majority, the backbone of the Taliban, sources said. .
ISIS-K takes its name from “Khorasan,” the ancient Persian name for the region, which includes parts of Iran, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, as well as parts of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Its propaganda, translated into local languages and English, vowed to establish a caliphate across the region.
Asfandyar Mir, a senior expert on South Asia security at the American Institute for Research, said: “ISIS-K… is trying to differentiate its brand, poach from competitors and draw away potential support by carrying out bolder attacks. to gain access to resources from rival jihadists to outpace rival jihadists.” said the Institute for Peace, a government research organization based in Washington.
Unlike previous high-profile suicide attacks by ISIS-K, Friday’s gunmen attempted to escape and were detained by Russian authorities about 300 kilometers west of Moscow, raising some doubts within Russia about whether they were indeed jihadists. In unconfirmed images shown in Russian media, one of the alleged attackers told interrogators that he had been offered 500,000 rubles (just over $5,000) to carry out the attack.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said for the first time on Monday that the attack was the work of radical Islamists, but he did not publicly link ISIS-K to the attackers, who he said had been trying to flee to Ukraine. Putin said “many questions” still need to be answered.
Colin Clark of the Soufan Center, a New York-based think tank on global security, said there are many examples of Islamist militants fleeing instead of carrying out suicide missions, such as the Islamic State gunman who fled after the attack on the Bataclan concert hall. November 2015 at the Paris Hall.
“They may be interested in conducting follow-up attacks,” Clark said, adding that attackers may also avoid purchasing or transporting explosives to reduce the chance of detection.
Frank McKenzie, the former commander of U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for parts of Central and Middle East and South Asia, said the attack in Moscow was consistent with ISIS-K’s long-term goal of increasing overseas operations. against the United States.
“They remain determined to attack us and our homeland,” said McKenzie, who headed U.S. forces in the region during the withdrawal from Afghanistan. “I think the likelihood is higher now than it was a few years ago.”
International recruitment
The U.S. State Department said in its reward announcement that Ghaffari was an experienced military leader who had planned ISIS-K suicide attacks in Kabul. Ghaffari is better known by the pseudonym Shahab al-Muhajir.
It singled out Ismatullah Khalozai as the group’s “facilitator of international finance” who ran an informal remittance network (hawala) from Turkey.
A July 2023 report to the United Nations Security Council on the international threat posed by the Islamic State put the number of ISIS-K in Afghanistan at 4,000 to 6,000, including fighters and family members.
Security experts trace the group’s expansion to the collapse of its parent Islamic State (IS) movement during the 2017 war in Iraq.
A senior Iraqi security official who spoke on condition of anonymity said many foreign fighters fled Iraq and arrived in Afghanistan and Pakistan to join ISIS-K, bringing expertise in guerrilla warfare that strengthened the group’s presence in Iran, Turkey and Afghanistan. The ability to launch attacks. .
Based on information from dozens of senior ISIS personnel detained over the past two years, Iraqi security services believe ISIS-K has been working to establish a regional network of jihadist groups that could help carry out international attacks, the official said.
The Iraqi official said that two senior Iraqi ISIS leaders who were captured in Turkey and handed over to Baghdad in December told Iraqi intelligence services that they would exchange information with Ghaffari through two Tajik members of ISIS-K in Turkey. , seeking financial and logistical support. is part of the security services that monitor Islamic State activities in Iraq and neighboring countries.
One Taliban intelligence official estimates that 90 percent of ISIS-K cadres are now non-Pashtun. Tajiks and Uzbeks are other large ethnic groups living in northern Afghanistan.
Mawlawi Habib Rahman, a former senior ISIS-K leader who surrendered to the Taliban, told Afghan media outlet Al-Mirsaad in November that the group had also successfully recruited Tajik nationals.
“They were told you were an infidel and now you have just become a Muslim (after joining ISIS-K),” Rahman said. He said recruiters said Tajikistan’s government was made up of “infidels” and that ISIS-K wanted to save oppressed Muslims.
A January 2024 United Nations report on the group noted that the group had stepped up efforts to recruit foreign fighters and disillusioned Taliban members, particularly Tajiks. Tajikistan citizen Khukumatov Shaamil Dodihudoevich, also known as Abu Miskin, has allegedly become an active propagandist and recruiter personnel.
Tajikistan is a Persian-speaking, predominantly Sunni Muslim country of 10 million people. After a brutal civil war in the 1990s, it remains one of the poorest former Soviet republics. Its economy relies heavily on remittances from more than one million Russian migrant workers.
Tajik officials say many Tajiks living in Russia complain of mistreatment, making them easier targets for recruitment by extremists while away from home.
Crosshairs between Russia and the West
The Moscow attack came a day after a senior U.S. military officer told the House Armed Services Committee that the Taliban’s efforts to suppress ISIS-K in Afghanistan were proving insufficient.
Gen. Michael “Eric” Kurila, commander of U.S. Central Command, said in written testimony that the Taliban has targeted some senior leaders of the Islamic State-K group but does not have the ability or inclination to maintain pressure on the group. This allowed ISIS-K to rebuild its network, he said.
“Islamic State Khorasan has retained the ability and willingness to attack U.S. and Western interests abroad with little warning in just six months,” Kurila told a Senate committee hearing this month.
Zabihullah Mujahid, spokesman for the Taliban government in Kabul, said the Islamic State-K group has been severely weakened by a security crackdown and has only carried out rare operations targeting civilians. He denied that the group was based on Afghan territory but said it was unclear where its bases were.
A United Nations report in January said the decline in Islamic State attacks in Afghanistan may reflect changes in Ghafari’s strategy and the Taliban’s counterterrorism efforts.
In July and December last year, authorities in several European countries arrested a group of new ISIS-K members suspected of planning terrorist attacks.
Christine Abizaid, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told a House committee in November that ISIS-K has so far been using “less experienced operatives” to launch attacks in Europe.
France, which will host the Olympics starting in late July, said late Sunday it would raise its terror alert to the highest level following the shooting in Moscow.
Security experts say ISIS-K has focused on Russia over the past two years, criticizing Putin for changing the course of Syria’s civil war by backing President Bashar Assad against the Islamic State.
“ISIS-K has been plotting attacks inside Russia for some time,” said Aaron Zelin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a U.S. think tank. He noted that the group had recently tried unsuccessfully to launch attacks inside Russia.
Russia’s FSB security service said on March 7 that it had foiled an armed attack by the group on a synagogue near Moscow.
Zelin said ISIS-K’s networks within communities in Tajikistan and Central Asia could help carry out operations in Moscow, which has a large immigrant population.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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