The next wave of global terrorists is just as menacing as ISIS but isn’t from the Middle East
The way Westerners think about Islamist terrorism has grown dangerously outdated.
For decades, officials have focused on attacks launched by Middle Easterners. Today, however, the real threat increasingly comes from further east.
In the former Soviet states and beyond, militants who once harbored mostly local grievances are turning their attention to the West. They will be the menace to watch in 2019.
The threat posed by Middle Eastern terrorists has been shrinking for some time. Even during the war against the Islamic State, Russian speakers from former Soviet countries were already committing many of the major attacks in the West.
Those included relatively simple lone-wolf events, such as the 2017 truck strikes on pedestrians in New York and Stockholm—both conducted by Uzbeks—but also more complicated operations, such as the 2016 suicide bombing of Istanbul’s airport—which was allegedly organized by a Russian national—and the 2017 attack on a nightclub in the same city, led by an Uzbek.
For starters, in recent years Middle Eastern jihadis have been too preoccupied with local conflicts in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen to head elsewhere. The pull of the Islamic State, meanwhile, has faded after its almost total defeat in Iraq and Syria.
At the same time, the wars in the Middle East have transformed militants from Russian-speaking areas, who previously focused on fighting repressive governments at home, into global terrorists.
By 2017, at least 8,500 fighters from former Soviet republics had flocked to Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic State. That experience gave many of these jihadis their first taste battling U.S. and NATO troops, and it left them looking for vengeance, convinced that future operations should be aimed at the West.
Ahmed Chataev, for example, who allegedly organized the attack on Istanbul’s airport, apparently first cooked up plans to strike Western targets while fighting in Iraq and Syria. A phone conversation leaked last year between Chataev and another Russian-speaking terrorist, Islam Atabiev, revealed that the two were planning to collect intelligence on several U.S. consulates and restaurants popular with Americans in Turkey and Georgia.
The same dynamic has played out further east, where battle-tested jihadis from the post-Soviet world can travel far more easily than Arabs who hold Iraqi, Syrian, or Yemeni passports.
As the persecution of Muslims in Asia grows, so do opportunities for grievances to turn international. When I was in Bangladesh in July 2018, I came across at least two separate groups from the Caucasus providing religious aid in Muslim Rohingya refugee camps.
A leader of a Russian-speaking group affiliated with militants in Syria said he had likewise planned to send some of his people to Bangladesh.
Such contact could boost the capabilities of local jihadis already conducting anti-Western operations in the area, including those who in 2016 stormed a bakery in Dhaka that was popular with expats. And it may win more Rohingya over to the idea that they’re involved in a global struggle for Islam, not just a local fight for their own survival.
With the fall of the Islamic State, Russian-speaking terrorists were mostly able to flee Iraq and Syria with more ease than Middle Eastern foreign fighters and are now back in hiding in the former Soviet sphere or in Europe. Having escaped the reach of the U.S. military, they may find it easier to bring their plots to fruition. Local sympathies will help.
Government neglect and outright repression have made religious Muslims in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan attractive targets for radicals looking for new recruits. Several popular sheikhs from the Middle East, including the Saudi cleric Abdulaziz al-Tarefe, now have significant Russian- and Arabic-language followings on social media.
As the locus of terrorism changes, the United States and its allies will have to update their strategies for fighting it.
Source: Business Insider
