It’s no small secret that Russian-speaking militants from Central Asia are
a critical element of today’s Salafi-jihadi terror threat. Religious
repression, poor governance, economic hardship, political violence, and the
siren call of ISIS all helped spawn a new generation of recruits and draw
seasoned fighters to the battlefields of Iraq and Syria. Over the past few
years, terrorists from Central Asia have also struck beyond the immediate
battlefield, at civilian targets in Turkey, Russia, Sweden, and the United
States.
Origins of Central Asian Militancy
Long before Central Asians joined the battlefield in Iraq and Syria, they
featured prominently among other violent extremist fighters in the
violence-soaked landscape of South and Central Asia. Soon after the fall of
the Soviet Union in 1991, and the rise of authoritarian Central Asian
states, anti-regime fighters from Central Asia cropped up to challenge
these dictatorships, and to fight U.S.-led coalition forces alongside al
Qaeda, the Taliban, and other groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Best known among these is the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), rising
in opposition to the Uzbek regime of Islam Karimov in the 1990s. Other
fighters—many from Central Asia’s restive Ferghana Valley, joined in the
Tajikistan civil war from 1992-1997, while others carried off sporadic
attacks in southern Kyrgyzstan.
Over time, economic conditions, corruption, and governance in Central Asia
darkened while space for open political and religious expression remained
virtually non-existent. This led millions of young men to seek employment
in Russia and elsewhere, often in deplorable working and living
conditions—but where Islamic religious tradition and influence was more
readily accessible. At the same time, those who remained in Central Asia
were driven underground to practice Islam and to foment resistance to
totalitarian regimes.
In Russia, Central Asian workers found both economic and spiritual
sustenance. Marginalized within Russian society and far from their families
and other sources of moderation, some of these young men sought refuge in a
more intolerant interpretation of Islam and in the reassurances of
fundamentalist preachers offering guidance in the face of loneliness and
hardship. Millions of Central Asian men made Russia their long-term,
temporary home—unwittingly becoming a broad recruitment pool for
Salafi-jihadi recruiters seeking fighters.
Meanwhile, the IMU—embattled and eventually subordinated to local and more
powerful groups along the Afghan-Pakistan border—was in decline as the
civil war in Syria gathered momentum in late 2011. When ISIS took Mosul,
Iraq and declared a caliphate in the summer of 2014, it offered an
irresistible and compelling lifeline to both veteran and aspiring fighters
with little progress to show in their own region.
A Unifying Call to Battle in al-Sham
An emerging, westward movement to battle reinforced Salafi-jihadi
prophesies of an eventual conflict in the Levant following one in the
Khorasan—an area covering much of today’s Central Asia. Fortified with a
divinely-sanctioned plan, the IMU—long an al Qaeda-affiliated
group—immediately switched allegiance to the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi.
Joining the multinational, multiethnic militants operating across Syria
proved only a minor challenge. Central Asian fighters slipped from one
Russian-speaking facilitator to another. Beginning in Istanbul where their
international flights terminated, fighters and recruits moved southward
through Ankara and Gaziantep, through an open border and into the most
important and dynamic jihadi battlefield. Purpose, income, and glory were
now at hand for Central Asians who had experienced little or none at all.
Central Asians—roughly 2,000 in number—played roles ranging from suicide
bombers to senior commanders, highlighted by Gulmurod Khalimov, a
U.S.-trained leader of Tajikistan’s OMON counterterrorism police who
switched sides to join ISIS. With thousands of other fighters on the
battlefield speaking a common Russian language, Central Asians became part
of a larger jihadist community linked across Europe, Russia, and the Middle
East.
A Global Reach
But the maelstrom of Syria and Iraq would not be the only stage for Central
Asia’s violent extremists. With communities across the globe, they offered
ISIS an embedded network of potential suicide bombers and attackers who
could heed the long-distance call to battle sounded by ISIS spokesman Abu
Mohammad al-Adnani.
And strike they did, in some of the biggest media markets in the world. On
Halloween eve, 2017 in New York City, the Uzbek lone-wolf, Sayfullo Saipov,
drove a rented truck down a bicycle path, killing eight innocent people. A
similar attack took place in Stockholm, Sweden only six months earlier, at
the hands of another Uzbek, Rakhmat Akilov. Other prominent attacks
attributed to Central Asians included two recent assaults in Turkey: a June
2016 Istanbul airport attack (featuring Uzbek, Kyrgyz, and Russian
perpetrators) and the New Year’s Eve 2016 attack on Istanbul’s Reina
nightclub, carried out by an Uzbek national, Abdulkadir Masharipov. Russia
itself was not spared, with an April, 2017 attack on the St. Petersburg
Metro by an ethnic Uzbek who was raised in southern Kyrgyzstan.
With a broad, ethnic and linguistic network to facilitate their movement,
Central Asian, Russian-speaking fighters can travel with relative ease
across a geographically contiguous environment. Linked through marginalized
diaspora and criminal networks, this framework enables movement and
sustenance while also providing sanctuary. Authoritarian, poorly-performing
governments that are inhospitable to Islam and the potential challenge it
poses to regime control and legitimacy, will continue to fortify the
factors pushing young men to seek membership and empowerment in
Salafi-jihadi organizations.
Though fewer than 1,000 of the estimated 8,500 Russian-speaking fighters
have returned to Russia or Central Asia, they do so as force
multipliers—able to bring their battlefield skills to bear on regimes they
have sworn to depose. These regimes—successful over the years in presenting
the West with a binary choice between their “secular” governments and
“terrorist groups”—will be able to cite the return of seasoned fighters as
cover for the continued exclusion of alternative voices and tight control
of Islamic practice—all of which has proven central to the recruitment of
fighters in the first place. A vicious cycle indeed.
Thomas M. Sanderson is a senior associate with the Transnational
Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies
(CSIS) in Washington, D.C.
Commentary
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