Who are ISIS-K and why would they attack Russia?

A ruthless Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for the Moscow attack (Credits: AP)

Islamic State terrorists have claimed responsibility for the massacre at a concert hall near Moscow. But who are the extremists?

More than 110 people have died, including children, after heavily armed attackers stormed into the Crocus Concert Hall on the outskirts of Moscow yesterday evening.

Just hours after the attack, the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the brutality.

US intelligence officials said they warned Kremlin that the group’s branch in Afghanistan was planning an attack in the Russian capital.

The attack comes just days after Vladimir Putin declared a landslide victory in the Russian presidential election which many in the West condemned as a sham win.

The concert hall was engulfed by flames after the fighters threw grenades (Credits: via Reuters)

Now Putin has pledged to ‘punish’ the four gunmen detained after the attack, claiming that they had tried to flee towards Ukraine.

Who are Isis-K?

Isis-K stands for Islamic State Khorasan.

The ultra-radical group is an Afghanistan-based affiliate of the feared Islamic State.

They seek to create a caliphate across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Iran.

Islamic State fighters holding the group’s ISIL branch banner (Credits: Universal Images Group via Getty Images/CPA Media Co. Ltd.

The branch emerged in lawless eastern Afghanistan in late 2014 and it gained notoriety for extreme brutality as it fought Afghan security forces, the Taliban and international NATO troops.

Although the group’s power has been in decline since the height of 2018, it is still active, and not just in Afghanistan as yesterday’s attack shows.

Isis-K was behind 83 attacks in Afghanistan between January 2020 and July 2021 alone, killing 309 people, according to CSIS.

Here is what we know about the violent group and its motives.

Why have Isis attacked Moscow?

Isis-K has not yet announced its exact motivation behind the atrocity.

But Isis and its affiliates hold a grudge against Russia.

‘ISIS-K has been fixated on Russia for the past two years, frequently criticizing Putin in its propaganda’, said Colin Clarke of the Soufan Center, a research centre.

Al-Shabab fighters have terrorised Somalia and East Africa as part of the wider ultra hardline Islamist movement inspired by al-Qaeda (Credits: AP)

The hatred intensified further after Putin changed the course of the Syrian civil war by intervening in 2015 by supporting controversial President Bashar al-Assad against opposition forces and Islamic State.

Isis-K sees Russia as ‘being complicit in activities that regularly oppress Muslims’, said Michael Kugelman from the Wilson Center in Washington DC.

Its fighters include Central Asian militants who hold their own grievances with Russia.

Moscow treats the Muslim-majority republics in the North Caucasus region with suspicion after past fights with insurgents.

There is a Caucasus arm of Isis which operates mainly in the republics of Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia and Kabardino-Balkaria.

Militants and Russian troops fought in Chechnya from 2007 to 2017, but state counter-terrorism operations in the region have not ended, Russian security service FSB has declared.

Have there been other Isis attacks in Russia?

Just hours before the US embassy’s warning, FSB said it had stopped an attack on a Moscow synagogue by Isis-K.

Most Islamist related attacks on Russian soil happened in the past 20 years during the height of the Chechnya conflict.

In October 2002, Islamist separatist took 850 hostages at the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow.

After a four day siege, Russian security services stormed the building using sleeping gas, killing all 40 terrorists.

Most of the 132 hostage casualties died because of the effects of the gas.

Then in September 2004, Chechen militants took more than 1,100 people hostage at a school in Beslan.

It ended in massacre as more than 330 people, around half of them children, were killed.

In October 2015, Islamic State planted a bomb in a passenger plane flying mainly Russian holidaymakers from Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt to St Petersburg.

The plane exploded above Egypt shortly after departure, killing all 224 passengers and crew on board.

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