Stanislav Ivanov, Leading Researcher at IMEMO RAS, Ph.D. of Historical Sciences

The large-scale terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall on March 22, 2024, which claimed the lives of over 140 Russian citizens, once again demonstrated the relevance of one of the most important tasks of the SCO – the fight against terrorism on the planet. Formally, the Afghan branch of the Islamic State (banned in the Russian Federation) took responsibility for this bloody massacre.

The final conclusion about the customers and organizers of this monstrous crime will be made by the Investigative Committee, whose official representative stated the already existing facts indicating a Ukrainian trace in this tragedy. The same idea was expressed by FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov. The direct perpetrators of the terrorist attack were individuals apparently associated with IS.

I would like to remind you that this group arose in 2006 in Iraq on the basis of a cell of the no less sinister terrorist group Al-Qaeda (banned in the Russian Federation). Its creation was facilitated by the atmosphere of chaos and violence in the country after the overthrow of the US and its allies from the regime of Saddam Hussein. IS/ISIL was headed by Sunni Iraqi Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a preacher of Salafism, a conservative movement in Islam.

With the help of Western intelligence services and the monarchies of the Persian Gulf, by 2014 a new rather powerful military-political group was created which soon established control over large territories of Syria and Iraq, and even threatened to capture Damascus and Baghdad. Initially, Washington and its regional allies from among the Arab countries hoped, with the help of IS, to overthrow the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and stop the Shiite expansion of Iran in the Arab East (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia).

However, the subsequent creation of the Islamic Caliphate with its capital in the city of Raqqa and the replenishment of its ranks with tens of thousands of adherents from all over the world were not included in the plans of the creators and curators of the Islamic State. The emergence of this group from the control of Washington, the outrages and atrocities of IS militants in the occupied territories, and a series of terrorist attacks in the EU and the USA forced its creators to gradually curtail the IS project.

By 2018, the international coalition under the auspices of the United States, with the help of Kurdish militias and the Russian Aerospace Forces, defeated the largest detachments of IS militants; in October 2019, the group’s leader, al-Baghdadi, was killed during a special operation by the US Armed Forces in the Turkish-controlled north-west of Syria. The military defeat of IS, as expected, did not lead to the elimination of the ideology of radical Islam. The surviving jihadist fighters dispersed into hard-to-reach areas of Syria and Iraq, some of them went underground and continued guerrilla warfare. A significant number of ISIS fighters migrated to Afghanistan, and some immigrants from Central Asian countries managed to return to their homeland. ISIS adherents and cells have appeared in Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and other African countries

The base country of the Islamic State has become Afghanistan, where a branch of the Islamic State has emerged called Velayat Khorasan (banned in the Russian Federation), which is trying to compete with the Taliban Movement (banned in the Russian Federation) and spread its influence in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, other Central Asian countries, China and India. The goal of its leaders is to create a new Islamic caliphate in these territories.

With its external expansion and aggression Velayat Khorasan is noticeably different from the Taliban who set themselves only the task of directly controlling Afghanistan. In its ranks were not only Pashtuns, but also ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, Uighurs, and representatives of other nationalities. The militants of this group manage to control large areas of Afghanistan, Pakistan, part of the legal local business and drug trade. Their ranks are replenished by extremist groups of the Taliban and other radical Islamists. The leaders of Khorasan Velayat maintain contacts with Western intelligence services and conduct active recruitment work using the Internet. There is information that this is how the citizens of Tajikistan who carried out the attack on Crocus City Hall were involved in terrorist activities.

The former director of the Executive Committee of the SCO Regional Anti-Terrorism Structure Evgeniy Sysoev once stated that the structures created by the Velayat Khorasan group recruit, staff, train and transfer sabotage and terrorist groups to Europe, Southeast and Central Asia, as well as Russia, where they are created called “sleeper cells”. These autonomous groups often practice the tactic of randomly selecting targets for terrorist attacks in major metropolitan areas using online-trained jihadi sympathizers.

Khorasan Velayat is hostile to the start of trade and economic cooperation between the PRC and the Taliban government and views China as its potential enemy, trying to play the “Uyghur card” in its interests in order to provoke instability in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. In their anti-Chinese activities, the leaders of the Khorasan affiliate of IS do not limit themselves to promoting narratives aimed at demonizing and intimidating China, but even attempt to carry out attacks on Chinese citizens and Chinese targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The group began to actively spread its propaganda throughout the world, using both original and translated materials in various languages (including Pashto, Dari, Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, Uzbek, Tajik, Hindi, Malayalam, Russian, English, and Uyghur). We have to admit that no other “branch” of the Islamic State, with the exception of the Islamic State itself at the peak of its power, has demonstrated the ability to produce propaganda materials in such a large number of languages as the Velayat Khorasan propaganda machine. This suggests that while the group’s primary focus is on building a jihadist network at the local and regional level, it is also deeply involved in the Islamic State’s global project, significantly expanding the scope of its criminal activities far beyond the Afghanistan-Pakistan region.

In the summer of 2022, reports emerged that the Velayat Khorasan group had published a number of propaganda materials justifying the religious and political legitimacy of attacks on India, in particular on the leaders of the country and the ruling party (including Prime Minister N. Modi). Jihadist media content in minority languages used in India (particularly Malayalam) has begun to spread, indicating that extremists are interested in recruits from South Asia.

In September 2022, a suicide bomber in Velayat Khorasan carried out a bombing near the Russian Embassy in Kabul, killing two consular officers and about 20 local citizens. The same group claimed responsibility for a series of two bombings in the city of Kerman, Islamic Republic of Iran, on January 3, 2024, at the city cemetery during a ceremony marking the anniversary of the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani. Then at least 94 people became victims of the terrorist attack.

At the present stage, the terrorist threat to stability and regional security throughout the SCO area is not decreasing. This was discussed at the 19th meeting of the Secretaries of the Security Councils of the SCO member states, which took place on April 2-3 in Astana. Nikolai Patrushev, Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, who spoke there, thanked Tajikistan for the assistance provided in the investigation of the terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall and stated that new data confirms Ukraine’s involvement in this crime.

President Putin speaking about the tragedy that occurred stated with certainty: “Terrorists, murderers, non-humans, who do not and cannot have a nationality, face one unenviable fate – retribution and oblivion. They have no future”. The participants of the last meeting agreed with this approach to the fight against terrorism.