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4 August 2024

ISIS-K Goes Global The World Is Not Ready to Confront a New International Terror Threat

Colin P. Clarke and Lucas Webber

Over the past few weeks, French authorities have uncovered several terrorist plots targeting the 2024 Olympic Games, which began last week in Paris. In one of them, an 18-year-old Chechen man planned to attack an Olympic soccer match in the French city of Saint-Étienne. He was allegedly in contact with a member of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS). The disrupted plot was just the latest in a spike of terrorist activity linked to ISIS. The group’s affiliate, the South Asian–based Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K), is responsible for several successful international terrorist attacks this year alone—at a memorial service in Kerman, Iran, in early January; at a church in Istanbul later that month; and at a concert hall outside Moscow in March. The attacks in Iran and Russia combined left nearly 250 people dead and hundreds more wounded. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, where ISIS-K is based, the group claims responsibility for multiple smaller-scale attacks each month.

ISIS-K is not the only source of a heightened terror threat. In a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, the scholar Graham Allison and the former CIA deputy director Michael Morell compared the current security environment to that of the period leading up to al Qaeda’s attacks on September 11, 2001. The warning lights for large-scale violence, they concluded, are flashing as brightly today as in the years before 9/11, when high-profile attacks targeted U.S. embassies in East Africa and the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen. Of the many threats Allison and Morell outlined, however, ISIS-K is among the most concerning, given its capabilities and intent.

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