SUBRAMANYAM SRIDHARAN
Introduction
It is now established that the attack on the Crocus City Hall concert venue in Moscow Oblast on March 22, 2024 that killed 143 and injured over 80, was by the Khorasan branch of the IS (invariably denoted as IS-K or Islamic State Khorasan Province, ISKP), a part of the ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, also known as ISIL - Islamic State of Iraq and Levant -, or Dawalah Islamiyah or Da’esh), though the Russian President Putin tried desperately to implicate Ukraine in the affair initially. It is speculated that IS-K attacked a faraway Moscow, distant from its usual zone of operation, in order to demonstrate its growing reach.
The UN Secretary-General’s 18th biannual strategic-level report on the threat posed by the ISIS, authored by the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team of the UN Security Council, released on February 15 2024 stated that while ISIS-Sahel (Sahel is the region in North Africa just below the Sahara) posed the greatest threat, the IS-K remains the most serious terrorist threat in Afghanistan and neighbouring countries, retaining the ability to recruit and conduct attacks. The UNSC’s 2023 Report had already identified India as a country vulnerable to IS-K. According to the UN report cited above, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan has not taken any effort to curtail the IS-K and on the other hand, its release of several prisoners has already swelled the number of IS-K terrorists from 2,200 to 4,000. This, in spite of the fact that the Taliban and Al Qaeda have been at loggerheads with the ISIS ever since the latter’s formation. The two also fear that the other can wipe one out. The emir of IS-K is an Afghan Tajik, Sanaullah Ghafari
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