Friday’s bloody attack on a Moscow concert hall has been claimed by the terror group Isis, but Russian propagandists have sought to blame Ukraine.
Responsibility for the assault, in which four gunmen killed at least 133 people and incinerated the building, was attributed by the US and other western countries specifically to an Afghan-based affiliate called Isis-Khorasan, or Isis-K.
The US warned several weeks beforehand that an attack was likely. The four main assailants detained by the FSB on Saturday were all from Tajikistan, a Central Asian country whose citizens make up a large proportion of the members of Isis-K, according to analysts who monitor the group.
But Russian officials and state media have made little reference to Isis’s claim, and President Vladimir Putin did not mention Isis or Islamist terrorism in his first remarks to the nation after the atrocity.
Instead Putin, Russian officials and the FSB security service repeatedly claimed the assailants were intercepted while en route to Ukraine.
“It was not Isis. It was the Ukrainians,” Margarita Simonyan, the propagandist editor of state media channel Russia Today, wrote on her popular Telegram channel. “The perpetrators were chosen in such a way that they would convince the dumb global public that it was Isis.”
Ukrainian officials have vehemently denied any involvement and said that Putin is trying to blame Kyiv in order to create a pretext to escalate his 10-year war.
“Miserable Putin, instead of attending to his own citizens of Russia, addressing them, remained silent for a day thinking about how to link this with Ukraine”, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his Saturday night address from Kyiv.
He also insinuated that Russia could have stopped the attack had its security forces not been waging war against Ukraine.
“Those hundreds of thousands of Russians who are now killing on Ukrainian land would surely be enough to stop any terrorists,” he said.
By linking Ukraine to the attack, Russia can stoke domestic anger against its neighbour and deflect attention from the gaps in its security system that have widened since the war in Ukraine.
Vera Mironova, an associate fellow at the Davis Center at Harvard University who studies Islamist terrorist movements in the former Soviet Union, said Isis-K hit Moscow because it was relatively easy: “It’s about the convenience of the target.”
By contrast Isis-K has planned several attacks in Europe in recent months but they were foiled.
It was notable that the assailants were able to strike while Russia was in a state of war, with its military and security services mobilised, Mironova added.
Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago, the FSB, Russia’s main internal security service, has shifted its focus, according to an analysis of official statements by the independent Novaya Gazeta Europe newspaper.
Previously the FSB focused almost entirely on the Islamist terror threat but since 2022, the vast majority of its statements have related to Ukraine. Often those accused of “terrorism” and intercepted by the FSB were Russians protesting against the war or the government, Novaya Gazeta’s analysis showed.
“Putin thought his fight against Islamic militancy was over after the pacification of Chechnya,” the Muslim-majority republic that fought and lost two wars for independence in the 1990s and 2000s, said Kamal Alam, a non-resident fellow with the Atlantic Council.
In fact, Russia has long been an Isis target, and this “markedly increased after its military intervention in Syria in 2015, its subsequent involvement across Africa, and its relations with the Taliban”, said Lucas Webber, co-founder of MilitantWire, which produces analysis of militant activity.
Isis-K first started operating in 2015 in Afghanistan and Pakistan after the original Isis declared a caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria.
It drew strength from militants who believed that existing groups like al-Qaeda were not hardline enough. The group aims to create a caliphate in Khorasan, a region extending across parts of the Indian subcontinent and central Asia.
After the Taliban took power in Afghanistan following the withdrawal of Nato troops in 2021, Isis-K went on to become its most formidable adversary, fighting a bloody insurgency and using Afghanistan as a base for attacks elsewhere.
Isis-K has killed hundreds of people in recent years, waging a campaign against Afghanistan’s Shia minority and a string of assassination attempts of prominent Taliban leaders. It attacked a political rally in Pakistan last year, and was linked to deadly bombings near the grave of commander Qassem Soleimani in Iran in January.
While Isis in Iraq and Syria has weakened in recent years, Isis-K has developed into the movement’s “most ambitious and internationally-minded branch”, Webber said.
Isis-K launched a suicide attack against the Russian embassy in Kabul in September 2022.
“Isis-K has even rolled out a Russian-language propaganda wing,” Webber said. “It has placed heavy focus on inciting supporters to carry out attacks against Russia.”
Many of those members come from Tajikistan, Mironova said — a poor country where large numbers of people travel to Russia as migrant workers.
“In the Isis doctrine, Russia is as bad as the US, China and Iran,” said Asfandyar Mir, a senior fellow at the United States Institute for Peace. “Isis-K believes [in] external attacks which are spectacular in nature, which make a big splash and establish its bona fides as the top jihadist movement in the world.”
Although Russia has taken up the Palestinian cause in the conflict with Israel, for groups such as Isis-K, “their grievances with Russia and with Putin are more long-standing”, said Hanna Notte, director for Eurasia at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “They’re over Chechnya, they’re over Afghanistan.”
If confirmed, the Moscow concert hall attack would be Isis-K’s first major terror attack outside south-west Asia. It may be intended to raise the group’s profile and broaden its recruitment pool, said Amira Jadoon, assistant professor in the department of Political Science at Clemson University.
As a result, Friday’s attack may be just the latest sign that Afghanistan is becoming a base for global terror attacks once again, analysts said.
“There’s been a stepped up concern in the last year or so about enabled attacks” by Isis-K from Afghanistan, said Mir. “They’ve been keen on demonstrating geographic range.”
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