Opinion: Fumbling Russian spies fail to stop ISIS-K attack, despite warnings from U.S.

NO COUNTRY HAS BETTER intelligence on the Islamic State-Khorasan Province (known as ISIS-K) than the United States. American forces have faced ISIS-K almost from the moment the group was founded in 2015 in Pakistan, just a few miles from the Afghan border. It was there that a group of disaffected members of the Tehreek-e-Taliban-e-Pakistan (TTP, commonly referred to as the Pakistani Taliban) began turning their backs on al-Qaeda, which they saw as a failing brand, and joined the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

By 2017, ISIS-K had begun to draw to its ranks hundreds of fighters from central and south Asia, who were inspired by the group’s goal of establishing an Islamic caliphate in the lands of the greater Khorasan. The term refers to a historical region that extends from eastern Iran and Turkmenistan, to the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, containing all of present-day Afghanistan, most of Uzbekistan, and even some parts of the Russian Caucasus. Like the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) during its heyday, ISIS-K aspires to establish control over a territorially unified entity and then use perpetual war to expand its influence in central Asia and beyond.

Until 2021, the biggest obstacle to ISIS-K’s plan for regional domination was the U.S. By some accounts, American forces and Western-trained Afghan commando units had managed to eliminate more than half of ISIS-K’s 4,000-strong base in northeastern Afghanistan. Since the hurried U.S. withdrawal from the country in 2021 (which was marred by an ISIS-K suicide bombing that killed nearly 200 people, including 13 U.S. troops), ISIS-K has expanded its reach beyond all prior measure. The group has since claimed responsibility for attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and now Russia, that have killed over 600 people and injured thousands.

A primary reason for the proliferation of ISIS-K’s terrorist activity is that the U.S., which has more intelligence than anyone on the group, issues warnings that are not being taken into consideration by the group’s primary targets, namely Afghanistan, Iran, and Russia. Indeed, despite the Washington’s best efforts, its warnings about pending ISIS-K attacks have been ignored by the group’s primary targets. A few days after an ISIS-K attack killed nearly 100 people in Kerman, Iran, The Wall Street Journal claimed the U.S. government had provided Tehran with “a private warning” of an imminent terrorist threat from ISIS-K. If that is true, then the Iranians clearly did not heed Washington’s warning.

It now appears that, once again, Washington had considerable intelligence insight into ISIS-K’s plans to strike inside Russia. On March 7, the U.S. embassy in Russia warned on its website that “extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow, to include concerts”. The warning provided no specifics. However, seeing how U.S. authorities issued private warnings to Iran, a country with which the U.S. has no diplomatic relations, then it is highly likely they provided similar information to Russia, which at least hosts American diplomats and intelligence officers on its soil. Yet, not only did the Russians ignore these warnings, but they openly dismissed them. Read more of this post