Migrant Tajiks in Russia are suffering a backlash after four of their countrymen appeared in court over Friday’s terrorist attack in Moscow that killed 137 people. In the wake of the massacre at Moscow’s Crocus City concert hall, members of the 1.3 million strong Tajik diaspora have complained of death threats, police harassment and evictions from properties.
So what? The tensions underline Russia’s long-fraught relationship with the Muslim minorities of its old Soviet empire – and help explain why Islamic State may now have Moscow in its sights as much as the West.
The Moscow attack was not the first headline-grabbing atrocity to be carried out by the group’s central Asian franchise, which calls itself Islamic State in Khorasan Province, or Isis-K.
- The name comes from an ancient caliphate that once encompassed much of the region, including modern-day Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
- As ambitious as it is ferocious, Isis-K is already waging war on the neighbourhood’s other Islamist powerbrokers, launching numerous attacks on the Afghan Taliban.
- In January, it claimed responsibility for a bombing in Iran that killed nearly 100 people commemorating the death of Qasem Soleimani, the late head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
While Russia may be a relatively new target, it is, in Isis-K’s eyes, an old enemy, with a long history of Muslim repression. The rap sheet includes 70 years of secular Soviet imperialism, Moscow’s wars against mujahideen fighters during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and two brutal campaigns against Chechen separatists in the 1990s.
The Tajik connection. Putin’s armed intervention on behalf of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria since 2015 has turned the tide of the civil war decisively in Assad’s favour. The losers include democratic and moderate Islamic rebel groups, but Russian warplanes have also targeted factions from Islamic State’s original Syria-based operation – which has a Tajik connection.
- Islamic State in Syria includes up to 2,000 Tajiks in its ranks, according to Edward Lemon of Texas’s Bush School of Government and Public Service.
- Most were recruited not directly from Tajikistan, but from the diaspora in Russia, where roughly a fifth of Tajikistan’s population work as migrant labourers.
- The remittances they send home from jobs like taxi driving and fruit-picking are essential to Tajikistan’s economy, the weakest in the former Soviet Union.
Lemon reckons that not every Tajik went to Syria planning to become a hard-core terrorist. Some, he says, were told they’d get paid well. Others thought that the “Caliphate” would be a benign Muslim paradise – better, at any rate, than life in Russia’s migrant labour underclass, where discrimination and exploitation are rife. Whatever the reason, Tajiks have since played a role in many of Isis-K’s operations.
A Tajik suicide bomber took part in the attack on those mourning Qasem Soleimani in Iran. In the last four years, Tajiks have been detained in Austria, Germany and Turkey over alleged terror plots in Europe.
Isis-K hasn’t forgotten about its other enemies in the West – and like most terror groups, it acts partly where opportunities arise. But Russia’s big Tajik diaspora makes it an easy target. There are plenty of people for Isis-K operatives to blend in with, and plenty more for them to recruit – many in low-level service jobs that might give them knowledge of public buildings and their weak spots.
Hiring. The Guardian has reported that Islamic State launched a recruitment drive last year in Tajikistan and other central Asian countries, poaching from other militant groups and ex-Taliban members. Ali Nazary, of the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan, an anti-Taliban movement, says despite the rivalry between the Taliban and Isis-K, the two often cooperate, “especially at mid and low-ranking levels”.
What’s more… Syria, where Isis first came to world attention, is suffering some of its worst violence in four years, a UN report says. Long overshadowed by Ukraine and Israel-Gaza, fighting still continues there on multiple fronts, with Russian-backed Syrian forces, the Islamic State and Turkish and Iran-backed factions all active.
Nearly 50,000 people, including 28,000 children, continue to languish in detention camps for alleged Isis suspects run by Western-backed Kurdish forces.
Postcards from America - Don’t bet against San Francisco
Pulitzer prize-winning journalists Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan make sense of America for Tortoise in the second fortnightly edition of Postcards from America, featured in today’s Sensemaker. The full version, about why we shouldn’t be betting against San Francisco, is available to view on the Tortoise website.
“Hey there, Kevin!”
The car was talking to us. Weird.
We buckled up in the backseat of a driverless taxi in San Francisco and pushed the “start ride” button on the iPad-sized screen. The steering wheel turned by itself, and we eased into traffic. It felt a bit like a scene from a horror movie, but the car drove itself smoothly, and even pulled over for a passing ambulance.
We didn’t know what to expect when we visited San Francisco this month, given all the gloomy headlines about the city’s decline since the Covid pandemic
We live on the East Coast where taxis still have a person in the driver’s seat and we hadn’t seen anything like these white Jaguar SUVs with cameras on their roof and sides.
The rest of the column is available exclusively on the Tortoise website.
