ISIS Attacks Russia: Dissecting the Terror Attack at a Moscow Concert Hall with fmr. Counterterrorism Official Javed Ali
Javed Ali, former counterterrorism official and current professor at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy
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This week, A'ndre is joined by Javed Ali, a former counterterrorism official who served as Senior Director of Counterterrorism on the National Security Council, to discuss Friday's horrific ISIS terror attacks at the Crocus City Hall in Moscow, Russia. Javed and A'ndre discuss what ISIS-K is, and how the Afghan-based group is different from the 'core' ISIS that has operated in Iraq and Syria. Javed outlines how ISIS-K has grown in recent years and their abilities to plot attacks outside of their locality, citing the recent ISIS-K suicide bombings in Iran and foiled plots in Europe. A'ndre and Javed also chat about how U.S. Intelligence warned both Russia and Iran in the days preceding the respective ISIS-K attacks and how the Afghanistan withdrawal has affected intelligence gathering. Javed provides his take on the profiles of those who have conducted ISIS-K's attacks, and whether the tactics taken in Moscow bear parallels to the 2015 Paris Attacks or 2008's 26/11 attacks in Mumbai.
KEY QUOTES
ON THE EVOLUTION OF ISIS-K SINCE 2014
3:30 — “The first five or six years of [ISIS-K’s] evolution, it was very locally and regionally focused — still brutal, violent, indiscriminately attacking ethnic and religious minorities in Afghanistan… they were responsible for the terrible suicide bombing at the Hamid Karzai Airport on August 26th, 2021 when the U.S./NATO was trying to withdraw from Afghanistan… and that’s when they came onto the broader international scene. But what we’ve seen over the last couple of years, they’ve moved well beyond their immediate home base of South Asia. They have now conducted this terrible attack in Moscow. If your listeners remember, on January 4th of this year, there were two suicide bombers who killed themselves about 20-30 minutes apart at a funeral procession in Kerman, Iran for Qassem Soleimani… those are two very distinctly different types of external attacks we’ve seen. And there have been disrupted plots in Europe from people who have direct ties or are sympathetic to ISIS-K, both in Germany. One last December, five individuals were arrested, and just this week before the news of the Moscow attacks two other individuals were arrested in Germany, these two were of Afghan descent, and were planning to attack the Swedish Parliament. So ISIS-K, ten years after its origins, looks so different now, where it’s able to project these types of complex plots, either in the Middle East into Eastern Europe with Russia or Western Europe with these arrests in Germany — and that’s a very troubling development.”
ISIS-CORE IN IRAQ AND SYRIA VERSUS ISIS-K IN AFGHANISTAN
8:37 — “ISIS in Iraq and Syria was under tremendous pressure, and thousands. if not more. of ISIS members were killed and captured there, but ISIS was always bigger as an idea, and potentially as an organization, than the main group in Iraq or Syria. There were at least a couple dozen jihadist groups in the mid-2010s that took the ISIS brand and name and either invented themselves new, or rebranded themselves from different jihadist stripes, and now that notion of what is ISIS is very different. Yes, ISIS-core in Iraq or Syria are probably not militarily defeated, but they don’t present the same kind of threat, they’ve been pushed underground and are more of a local threat in Iraq and Syria, but a group like ISIS-K that declared their allegiance to the main ISIS in Iraq and Syria a decade ago, they were also under a lot of military pressure from the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan. With the withdrawal in 2021… that ability to keep the sustained pressure and intelligence focus on what ISIS-K was doing in either Afghanistan or Pakistan, well that’s gone. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in these past few years, you’ve seen this resurgent ISIS-K that may not be bigger than it was a few years ago, but much more aggressive… ISIS is pushing plots so far outside its traditional base of operations, that this isn’t something that the group was able to do when the Western military coalition and the Afghan Government were hand and glove to put pressure on them, that dynamic is gone.”
ISIS-K IS NOT A MERELY A LOCAL THREAT, BUT A TRANSNATIONAL ONE
12:53 — “If there is a major ISIS-K attack in Europe, or in the worst case if there’s some attempted plot in the United States that looks like the kind of attacks that they’ve already been able to pull off, one would think that the Biden Administration is going to be forced into a difficult decision to go back into Afghanistan at some point… [ISIS-K’s] not just a local threat anymore, it has become a transnational one.”
ON U.S. INTELLIGENCE WARNING RUSSIA AND IRAN ON ISIS-K ATTACKS
16:00 — “With the Iran attack, this didn’t really make the headlines at the time, but the same thing happened — the U.S. had some pretty accurate intellgence insights on a potential ISIS-K threat in Iran, and based on the media reports I saw, it was passed to the Iranians, but they too weren’t able to stop that attack from happening. Was it because they dismissed the intelligence? Because it was coming from the U.S.? Did they not have the capability to disrupt the plot in advance? … even with the best intelligence in the world, if you can’t do anything with it, that’s the problem, and because we don’t have a military presence on the ground, it’s hard for the U.S. and the West to take the action that it wants, armed with all this great intelligence. This is the difficulty of this environment in Afghanistan, post-withdrawal.”
WHY DID ISIS-K ATTACK RUSSIA?
19:30 — “There are multiple factors at play. One could be ideological, these types of attacks fit in the broader ISIS vision of exporting terror and chaos against all of ISIS’ enemies, whether that’s Europe, the United States, in the region locally in South Asia, or even in places like Russia. At a broad level, it does fit within the vision for ISIS… but I also think because of the makeup of people within ISIS-K, and it’s not a monolithic group. There’s former Afghan Taliban members in there, individuals with the Pakistani Taliban… central Asian jihadists, Chechens, Tajiks, Uzbeks, who probably either had personal grievances or familiar and community ones against things the Russian or former Soviet Government did to them, so I could see those being equally compelling factors too, based on the makeup of ISIS-K. There are questions around capability, access, and ability to blend in and and plan a complex operation in an environment like Russia, because people are just familiar with the country, they can speak the language, act like locals, know the right people in a place like Russia to get logistics, weapons, travel documents, those are things that could also be a part of the equation. I don’t think there’s a single factor, I think there are several that have combined to result in what happened in Moscow. They did the same thing in Iran, and it looks like they tried to do the same thing twice in Germany and if not Sweden. The last year shows how ISIS is transforming into a group that has a global outlook, not only ideological but also operational… that’s not the ISIS-K came onto the scene ten years ago.”
ON THE ACTIVE SHOOTER TACTICS
25:05 — “These active shooter tactics or commando assault tactics, ISIS-core, this is what they pulled off in Paris in 2015 with 9 people, only 2 or 3 people actually trained by ISIS and then sent back, the other 6 were more home-grown and pulled into the plot, but still very lethal. Are they pushing everybody out of Afghanistan, or is it a blend of what we saw in the 2010s with ISIS, where some people got the training in the home base and others were more local, but can be added to the team that’s based on social connections or operational ones. I don’t believe in all of those, of those four external plots, that these were just people who were self-radicalized… this had much more of an organized aspect to it.”
PARALLELS TO PARIS IN 2015 AND MUMBAI IN 2008
27:00 — “The Mumbai Attacks in 2008 opened the door in the jihadist world to planning those kinds of operations, but that also was a bit different, because the people involved in the Mumbai attacks were from this Pakistan-based group called Lashkar-e-Taiba… which for the most part focused its attacks on India and Indian interests and was not as transnationally focused… but the commando style tactics, they used with devastating results, but in that operation, they split up into 5 2-man teams and fanned out into different parts of Mumbai… the same kind of operational model was carried out with the Paris Attacks, multiple targets, some that were intended to be suicide attacks… but the rest of the attacks featured these roving gun teams that were driving in cars and just shooting people in cafes, and moving to other targets. How many of those were opportunistic, versus how many were planned. The majority of those who died in the Paris Attacks though died in the Bataclan Theater shooting, where 2 or 3 members of that attack cell got access to the theater, and were indiscriminately shooting as many people as they could before they got killed by French law enforcement. In the Moscow attack, commando assault, we’ve seen that before in Mumbai and Paris. THE DIFFERENCE THOUGH is that of the 4 people, they all apparently stayed at that one venue in Moscow and committed the horrific attacks there, and then, this is something I’m still struggling to explain — they got arrested and didn’t kill themselves in the process. They didn’t have suicide vests… they didn’t get killed by law enforcement. The fact that all four were captured, that is very different from what happened in Mumbai, where only one person survived the attack, and in Paris where a few either escaped and then were involved in other plots, but usually the people who carry these types of attacks out get killed or kill themselves. That didn’t happen with the Moscow attack.”