OPINION — In light of the Moscow concert hall terrorist attack, it’s more likely than ever that ISIS will target U.S. interests abroad as soon as the group aligns their capabilities with their aspirations.
Last week, ISIS carried out a terrorist attack at a concert venue on the outskirts of Moscow, indiscriminately killing at least 133 people. A U.S. terrorist threat advisory was reportedly delivered to authorities in Moscow, evidently following U.S. duty to warn protocols. The threat information was apparently supported by intelligence that the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISIS-K) — active in Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan — was planning an attack.
None of this should come as a surprise in terms of the target or ISIS-K as perpetrators. Approaching the almost five-year anniversary of the loss of their last sliver of territory, in Baghuz, Syria, ISIS-K has marked its resurgence with a terrorist spectacle. And it is part of a growing pattern, with ISIS-K’s January twin attacks in Iran and masked attackers shooting congregants at a Roman Catholic church in Istanbul. Taken together, ISIS-K is successively upping the casualty counts and may be reemerging as a capable regional threat with global reach.
ISIS-K has been linked to a growing number of plots in Europe recently, too. German authorities disrupted an ISIS-linked plot last December to attack a cathedral in Cologne, Germany, and a few days ago, German authorities announced that two suspects with ISIS-K links were arrested as they plotted to attack the Swedish parliament.
These attacks and aspirations demonstrate that ISIS can still initiate opportunistic terrorist operations. The Moscow attack should be a warning, then, that the FBI director’s ‘blinking lights everywhere’ analogy in his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee last December was not hedging on the terrorist threats. Quite the contrary, one does not need to have access to classified intelligence to sense that the U.S. intelligence community is seeing a jarring array of terrorist threat streams.
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ISIS was not defeated in 2018, nor is it defeated today. That’s why I continue to argue for keeping a limited U.S. military footprint in Syria and Iraq to pressure remnants of ISIS, drive intelligence and maintain enduring relationships with Iraqi and Kurdish counterterrorism partners.
A once diminished post-caliphate ISIS is metastasizing from Syria to Africa. This is a predictable evolution, mutating from a robust 2014-17 terrorist movement to a more dispersed underground terrorist network. Syria may have been ground zero for the first generation of ISIS, but its waves ripple from Syria toward the West. In Iraq and Syria, the U.S. and coalition partners waged a multi-year counterterrorism campaign against ISIS while the Assad regime was actively supported by Putin’s Russia (it still is). In the minds of ISIS adherents, this alone is justification enough for attacking Moscow.
To put a finer point on it, why would ISIS-K attack Russia? In a word, revenge. As Senior Fellow at The Soufan Center Colin P. Clarke argues, “ISIS-K accuses the Kremlin of having Muslim blood on its hands, referencing Moscow’s interventions in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Syria.” Correspondingly, Douglas London, who specialized in counterterrorism, noted that “Thousands of Central Asians joined the Islamic State, and many returned from Syria and Iraq after the loss of the caliphate.” Putin’s “mission accomplished” pronouncement in 2017 declaring victory over ISIS in Syria certainly rings premature.
While the terrorist landscape may appear monolithic in light of Hamas and ISIS-K in today’s headlines, the two are vastly different strains of political violence. Unlike Hamas, ISIS-K has global ambitions that are more dangerous to the U.S in the long-term. Notwithstanding mythologies of Chechens in Syria, it is worth noting that jihadists from Central Asia and the Caucasus are indeed a metaphor for local terrorists going international, which underscores how ISIS messaging may have mobilized disparate jihadists from Tajikistan to attack a concert hall in Moscow.
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In 2016, I interviewed an ISIS defector, who had a rare opportunity to hear Omar al-Shishani speak in person. Al-Shishani was the most well-known Central Asian militant leader in Syria during the height of the civil war, and a ruthless opponent of Russia. By the time al-Shishani was killed in a U.S. airstrike, he was the ISIS minister of war. As the ISIS defector observed, for the more malleable foreign ISIS recruits, al-Shishani’s appearance would have been a powerful example to follow. Chechens and other jihadists from Central Asia were a symbol of the globalization of local terrorism, which is why any ISIS merger with jihadis from Tajikistan is worrying, especially in the aftermath of the spate of ISIS-K terror attacks.
If there’s any good counterterrorism news at all, it is that U.S. intelligence is effective enough to have passed at least two terrorism threat warnings to authorities in Iran and Russia in advance of two separate ISIS attacks. It’s ‘tilting at windmills’ for now to expect that the Taliban will be reliable counterterrorism partners, or for that matter, that they will decisively defeat ISIS-K in Afghanistan. Still, the Taliban have taken some counterterrorism measures by degrading ISIS-K leadership in Afghanistan.
The U.S. must remain relentless in its pursuit of intelligence on ISIS-K and the next generation of ISIS leaders—wherever their pre-operational planning is taking place. Whether the intelligence on ISIS is derived from over-the-horizon capabilities or on the ground human intelligence is beside the point; so far the U.S. intelligence system is working and delivering on its duty to warn.
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