What is Islamic State-K, the group that claims to have carried out the attack in Moscow

The United States Intelligence Service has confirmed the Islamic State's claim of responsibility for the shooting attack at a concert hall near Moscow on Friday (March 22) by a growing affiliate known as Islamic State Khorasan.

Better known as Islamic State-K, the group takes its name from an ancient term for the region that included parts of Iran, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan. It emerged in eastern Afghanistan in late 2014 and quickly established a reputation for extreme brutality.

“There is concern that this group is becoming more dangerous and especially in relation to attack targets that are not just linked to Afghanistan,” said Dan Byman, a senior fellow at the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

“ISIS-K has become one of the strongest, if not the strongest, parts of the Islamic State today,” he added.

Experts say Islamic State-K has established a foothold in Russia in recent years, seeing it as complicit in activities it says oppress Muslims.

“Russia is a long-standing enemy of the broader jihadist community if you go back very far, of course, to the fight in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. But in the 1990s, probably the number one hot spot in the world for jihad was Chechnya and Russia,” Byman said, also citing Russia’s support for Syria.

“Russia, of course, supported Syria during the civil war and the Islamic State was on the other side. So Russia is seen as working with Syria, fighting Muslims.”

Islamic States-K saw a drop in membership after the Taliban and American troops inflicted major losses on the group. But the United States views Islamic State-K as an ongoing threat.

“There is a dispute within the broader jihadist world between Islamic State-K and the Taliban,” Buman continued. “Islamic State-K blames the Taliban for being too close to Russia. Therefore, the group attacked the Russian embassy in Kabul and generally uses this as a talking point as a way to criticize the legitimacy of the Taliban.”

General Michael Kurilla, commander of US Central Command, told Congress this week that Islamic State-K was rapidly developing the capability to attack American – and Western – interests outside of Afghanistan “in just six months and with little or no no warning.”

Islamic State-K has a history of attacks inside and outside Afghanistan.

According to Dan Byman, the group “has thousands of fighters and was believed to be another guerrilla group that carries out occasional terrorist attacks, but largely focused on Afghanistan and some in Pakistan.” “However, recently there have also been some plots that European intelligence claims have still been disrupted,” warned Byman.

Earlier this year, the United States intercepted communications confirming that the group carried out bombings in Iran that killed nearly 100 people.

The group was also responsible for an attack on Kabul's international airport in 2021 that killed 13 American soldiers and dozens of civilians during the chaotic US withdrawal from the country.

Regarding the way Islamic State-K conducts attacks, Dan Byman says that the men who attacked the concert hall in Moscow “probably had some training. They are attacking the target in a coordinated fashion, so they probably had to plan for this to some degree.”

And he added: “This was a defenseless target. It's not attacking a military base, it's not like they're attacking people who could fight back. They chose a relatively easy target, but they did so in a way that appears to be coordinated.”