BACKGROUNDER

IS-K Global terrorist threat 

Zahid Hussain 

DAWN

Published March 27, 2024 

THE deadly attack on a concert hall in Moscow last week, which left around 140 people dead, marks the expansion in the terrorist operations of the so-called Khorasan chapter of the militant Islamic State group. The daring IS-K assault in the Russian capital demonstrates the group’s increasingly destructive capacity to carry out high-profile acts of terrorism beyond the region it has so far been operating in.

The attack has raised the profile of the IS-K as a global terrorist group that has long been active in Afghanistan and the surrounding countries. The suspects who were arrested are from the Central Asian region, which has produced a large contingent of foreign fighters for the Islamic State in the Middle East in the past. Many of them are now associated with its Khorasan chapter after the routing of the transnational jihadi group in Iraq and Syria.

It is, however, not clear why the group targeted Russia. According to some analysts, the militants see Russia as responsible for the persecution of Muslims. In September 2022, IS-K claimed responsibility for a deadly suicide bombing at the Russian embassy in Kabul. Moscow has long been concerned about the rise of IS-K’s influence in the Central Asian states.

While accusing the Islamic extremists of the attack, the Russian president has also tried to link the incident to the war with Ukraine. A recent UN report quoted by the Western media said, “Some individuals of North Caucasus and Central Asian origin travelling from Afghanistan or Ukraine towards Europe represent an opportunity for [IS-K], which seeks to project violent attacks in the West.”

Meanwhile, the Moscow massacre has alerted other countries to the growing terrorist threat. The IS-K has emerged as the most dangerous transnational terrorist group. A top American military official told a US congressional committee a day before the attack that the IS-K “retains the capability and the will to attack US and Western interests abroad, in as little as six months, with little to no warning”. According to some media reports quoting Western counterterrorism officials, in recent months, several IS-K plots to attack targets in Europe have been foiled.


A resurgent IS-K has emerged as the most dangerous transnational terrorist group.

An offshoot of the Middle East-based IS, the militant outfit, which was formed in 2015, has been involved in a series of spectacular attacks in Afghanistan and Iran. It was behind a bombing attack earlier this year that killed over 80 people in the Iranian town of Kerman during a memorial procession for Maj-Gen Qasem Soleimani, an Iranian commander who was killed in an American drone strike in 2020 in Baghdad. Several other attacks in Iran also have the group’s fingerprints all over them.

Just before the Moscow incident, the group had claimed responsibility for a suicide attack in Kandahar, the second largest city of Afghanistan, killing and injuring several people. The IS-K has also been responsible for attacks in Pakistan’s Balochistan province. Some banned Sunni sectarian groups have reportedly joined the group.

The first signs of the transnational militant group organising itself in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region emerged in 2014. Early IS-K recruits came from the ranks of splinter factions of the Pakistani Taliban, who had been driven into Afghanistan after large-scale operations in the former tribal region by the Pakistan Army. Some low-ranking Afghan Taliban commanders also joined the radical group.

In 2014, Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost — a former Afghan Taliban commander from Kunar province — was named organiser for the group’s Khorasan chapter. With some high-profile defections from the ranks of the Afghan Taliban, the group evolved a formal organisational structure.

In January 2015, the militants released a video proclaiming themselves the administrators of an official wilayat (province) for IS in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The creation of the shura for Khorasan (the historical name for the region including parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Central Asia) was endorsed by the IS supreme command. It named the former TTP commander of Orakzai Agency in Pakistan, Hafiz Saeed Khan, as IS head in the Khorasan region and Mullah Abdul Rauf, a former Afghan Taliban commander who had spent many years in Guantanamo, as his deputy.

Soon after the formation of its Khorasan chapter, the group became active in many provinces of Afghanistan. In most cases, defections from the Afghan Taliban ranks to the IS-K were motivated by the group’s huge financial resources rather than its radical and rigid worldview and ideology. In many regions, the Afghan Taliban fought with the IS-K for control.

However, IS-K underwent a rapid surge in numbers — which reached, as per some estimates, 4,000 — after the US forces exited Afghanistan and the Taliban once more took up the reins. Most of them have apparently come from other transnational militant groups. Its alliance with the TTP has further strengthened it.

There was a marked escalation in IS-K attacks at the end of the American war. The terrorist group also attacked Kabul’s international airport in 2021, in which 13 US troops and a large number of civilians were killed during the chaotic American withdrawal from the country.

According to a UN report released in January, the Afghan Taliban’s efforts to defeat the group have caused the number of attacks in Afghanistan to decline. But the threat posed by this terror nexus goes beyond the region.

With their strength increasing, transnational militant groups and foreign fighters are a dangerous threat to not only Afghanistan but also its neighbours, especially Pakistan. The Afghan Taliban’s continuing support for militant groups such as the TTP is seen as a significant reason behind the IS-K’s resurgence.

Many IS-K fighters have come from TTP factions who took refuge in Afghanistan. While the IS-K has been fighting the Afghan Taliban, the group has coexisted with TTP factions in eastern Afghanistan.

The Moscow attack makes it clear that the group’s growing capacity threatens the region and beyond. A joint regional strategy is needed to deal with this common threat.

The writer is an author and journalist.
zhussain100@yahoo.com
X: @hidhussain

Published in Dawn, March 27th, 2024

 

The Women Who Live Between the Barbed Wire and the Sea

In the next few days, after this story gets published, I will either save a pregnant woman and her child’s life or I will fail.

by Eros Salvatore / March 26th, 2024

May’s family

Latifa Najjar superimposes hearts over the faces of her children’s online photographs in the classic mother’s move to protect them. But, unfortunately, her children are in a Rafah refugee camp, and it’s the middle of the Israeli-Gaza war. So she’s unknowingly saving me from missing their beautiful faces, if I learn one day they’ve been murdered by bombs or famine. Exterminated by the bad luck of being born in Gaza, a country stripped not only of its housing and masjids (mosques), but food, water, and medical care. A country strip-searched by Israeli soldiers like they strip-search its women—taking their last bit of dignity and leaving nothing left but malnourished bodies and lips to pray with. Latifa lost almost everything—even her snow white, blue-eyed kittens Lia and Leo, for they were left behind in the misery of North Gaza, where they are sure to die.

Latifa’s brother is dead, a cousin too, but the family she created with her husband still lives. Her eldest daughter, Farah, age seventeen, translates Facebook messages between us. Deciphering her mom’s homegrown Arabic into an English she learned a la cart from Sherlock Holmes movies, social media and online classes. Amideast, an American NGO, gave her an award for an essay she wrote about her future: The Remarkable Story of Farah Najjar. Now that future seems impossibly far away.

Things are hard for Latifa’s family, so I take her children to the land of make believe, where they become a family of kings and queens. Why not? Latifa’s been so open with me, a total stranger. She has to tell a man she’s never met about her life and death struggles. Not a thing women usually do in Gaza. It’s a patriarchal culture, and I’m on the wrong side of history. But all that is forgotten as I entertain her children with a bedtime story.

In a faerie tale desert by the sea, I exchange their tattered refugee clothes for luxurious silk garments. I put them on gorgeous thrones set on thick carpets in Bedouin tents instead of dirt floors under blue tarps. The little princes and princesses enjoy endless sweets, playtime and peace. No bombs detonate here, no innocent people scream.

Years from now they will live in solace. They will forget that long ago missiles wiped out family and friends leaving half-living relatives to bury the dead. Tonight I take them to a world where children slay dragons and fear is conquered with toy swords and Aladdin’s wishes. Finally, the moonlight serenades faces as tired eyes fall asleep.

That next day I receive a call from a young woman, Fatima, who’s somewhere that’s not Rafah. Stuck on a rooftop overlooking a fractured city block. In her arms, her two-year-old son. Scattered around her: water, garbage and shame. Gunfire argues in the distance. Every building in the background is reduced to rubble or half burned up in flames. Trapped civilians scream out for help, but no one hears them. Fatima asks for money. I send ten dollars. “Ouch,” she replies, demanding more. A Facebook friend obliges. Then Fatima makes another request. The cycle continues. It will never stop. Scam, or not? Normally, I would have never sent her money—I’m not one for double drowning. But I forgive her because, just above, I witnessed hell on a smartphone screen.

This asking for money is the only control she has over life. She demands our charity, while facing death and being buried by debris. Regardless, she’s nearly alone, with only a few small souls for company, less in weight than they used to be, the lower echelon of refugees. Her only link to sanity is through the same technology that guides the smart bombs which kill whole families. I say goodbye. We will never talk again. She’ll be ravaged by circumstance, and I’ll write about her while sitting here, sickened by what I’ve seen.

Latifa posts videos of her children singing, dancing, pleading. I can feel her heart beating through the interwebs. There’s nothing else to do, but mask the horror with innocence. Long before the war she was a social researcher, a young woman with a college degree helping her people. And here she is, years later, kingdom gone and trapped among the poor.

But, she has plans. Like many Palestinians she’s had enough of the endless strife with Israel, and wants to leave Gaza. Enticed by the internet images of life outside their nation-state prison, she works at getting away by soliciting money for her Go Fund Me. With luck they will not perish in the genocide.

Another woman-lead family messages me. Samah Ouda is far away from food in a place called Nuseirat, a suburb by the sea. The remains of Turkish coffee houses, masjids and cemeteries are all that’s left. The beaches, strewn with chunks of concrete. The streets, peppered with powdered coffee. The call to prayer, absent from the broken minarets after endless centuries. She’s more desperate than Latifa, speaking in shorter sentences, not allowing herself to dream. Her children’s survival, less likely. Her words, terse and to the point. She taught English before the war. Now, she promotes her plight through Tik-Tok and Instagram, to fund her own Go Fund Me.

I focus on Latifa’s family and their future, not wanting to think about those who won’t make it, those whose death will have no meaning. I message her again, but she’s too busy trying to live, to listen. So I find a channel that’s live-streaming a Gaza hospital, where children play on wheelchairs amid the dying.

The next day we talk.

“Alhamdulillah (God help me), I’m desperate,” Latifa says. “We need a truce.”

So I say: “You are brave. You are strong.”

“Thanks a lot.” she replies. “We are happy to know you brother. I pray that we survive.”

Then an anonymous young woman asks me for help. She is alone, stranded in a home housing elderly and children. Like many, she has lost touch with her friends from before the war. I hear it all the time. A fragmented people, living fragmented lives, with fragmented families waiting to die. In this case the young woman is too afraid to go outside, or even look out the window. She has stayed off evil by refusing to see, her terror limited to the sound of bombs, gunfire and drones. But even so, her food is tasteless and nothing smells good. No one hugs her either, so she’s slowly losing the sense of touch as well. A solitary life in a solitary room, but still, that’s a better existence than some.

She is worried about what the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) will do to her if they invade Rafah. She has heard the stories, the tales of sexual assault. At first I avoid the topic, try to steer her mind somewhere else. But there is a very good chance she will be caught and stripped searched as she tries to flee. Likely in front of male Israeli soldiers, rifles pointed in her direction, ready to kill. She will feel humiliated. A young woman who’s never shown, since puberty, an unrelated man an inch of her skin not on her face or hands. The clothing the Israelis say oppresses her will now be used to violate what little she has left.

When I finally tell her about how to stem the anxiety and fear, my words feel like instructions for going to the gallows. Repeat this prayer in times of trouble: ‘I take refuge in the Lord of the people.’ Supposedly, the last line spoken before the Prophet’s (PBUH) death.

I hear about an airstrike striking Nuseirat that kills many women and children. I message Samah and luckily she replies, she is not hurt. We chit-chat for once, and I learn that before the war she was a high school physics teacher.

The next day I receive messages from two new women. Mays Astal and Maryam Hasanat are desperate. They are both eight months pregnant, in land with little medical care if anything goes wrong. One of them has a good chance of surviving, for the other everything has already gone wrong.

Mays, Catholic Relief Services employee, Palestinian Red Crescent Society engineer, found herself with nothing but a tent, her two children named Dialah and Mohammed and a husband. Yet she still spends three hours a day as a humanitarian worker risking death at the hands of the IDF. The perfect American nuclear family, except they live in a war zone, not prosperity.

One day the IDF decided it would be best if they burn down all the buildings in the refugee camp with incendiary munitions, then drive tanks through the tent city to run down the living. Mays and her family bury themselves in the sand, narrowly avoiding being run over. She clings to hope with another Go Fund Me, so she and her family can get out of hell and into Egypt. There she can give birth in peace.

Maryam has a beautiful Facebook profile picture from her wedding. In it her tall, handsome husband smiles as he looks down at her. Like nearly everyone else, they lost everything, and left their home as soon as Israel littered their living area with leaflets exalting doom and destruction for all who remain. Within a few weeks their apartment was bombed, and her brother-in-law was shot to death by the IDF as he drove back to his young wife and child.

A day after she contacted me, she sends me a message: “Today my best friend, Haia, and her baby died.”

“From a bomb?” I ask.

“No, Haia was pregnant, and she had to have a cesarean section.”

“What went wrong?”

“They cut her womb open with no anesthesia, and couldn’t stop the bleeding. Neither mother nor child survived.”

Then I find out why Maryam’s so desperate. She’ll need a c-section as well, because her pelvis is too narrow. That’s why she needs twenty-five thousand dollars to get to Egypt, so she and her baby won’t die in a hospital in Rafah that has no supplies. So she won’t become one of the thousands of women who have lost their lives between the barbed wire and the sea.

The following fundraisers will help bring hope to these families. They are listed in order of appearance in this story.

Latifa’s Go Fund Me Campaign

Samah’s Go Fund Me Campaign

Mays Go Fund Me Campaign

Maryam’s Go Fund Me Campaign

Maryam and husband

Pregnant Maryam and her son

Latifah’s daughter

• Please message the author at moc.liamg@erotavlassore if you want to inquire about helping refugees in Gaza.

•• First published in Z

Eros Salvatore is a writer and filmmaker living in Bellingham, Washington. They have been published in the journals Anti-Heroin Chic and The Blue Nib among others, and have shown two short films in festivals. They have a BA from Humboldt State University, and a foster daughter who grew up under the Taliban in a tribal area of Pakistan. Read other articles by Eros, or visit Eros's website.

Islamic State Group Affiliate Linked to Moscow Attack Has Global Ambitions

Eric Schmitt
Mon, March 25, 2024 

The funeral for a victim of the suicide attack at the international airport in Kabul in 2021 that was carried out by ISIS-K, in the hills outside of Kabul, Afghanistan on Aug. 27, 2021. (Victor J. Blue/The New York Times)


WASHINGTON — Five years ago this month, a U.S.-backed Kurdish and Arab militia ousted Islamic State group fighters from a village in eastern Syria, the group’s last sliver of territory.

Since then, the organization that once staked out a self-proclaimed caliphate across Iraq and Syria has metastasized into a more traditional terrorist group — a clandestine network of cells from West Africa to Southeast Asia engaged in guerrilla attacks, bombings and targeted assassinations.

None of the group’s affiliates have been as relentless as the Islamic State in Khorasan, which is active in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran and has set its sights on attacking Europe and beyond. U.S. officials say the group carried out the attack near Moscow on Friday, killing scores of people and wounding many others.

In January, Islamic State-Khorasan, or ISIS-K, carried out twin bombings in Iran that killed scores and wounded hundreds of others at a memorial service for Iran’s former top general, Qassem Soleimani, who was targeted in a U.S. drone strike four years earlier.

“The threat from ISIS,” Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, told a Senate panel this month, “remains a significant counterterrorism concern.” Most attacks “globally taken on by ISIS have actually occurred by parts of ISIS that are outside of Afghanistan,” she said.

Gen. Michael Kurilla, head of the military’s Central Command, told a House committee on Thursday that ISIS-K “retains the capability and the will to attack U.S. and Western interests abroad in as little as six months with little to no warning.”

U.S. counterterrorism specialists Sunday dismissed Russia’s suggestion that Ukraine was behind Friday’s attack near Moscow. “The modus operandi was classic ISIS,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The assault was the third concert venue in the Northern Hemisphere that the Islamic State group has struck in the past decade, Hoffman said, after an attack on the Bataclan theater in Paris in November 2015 (as part of a broader operation that struck other targets in the city) and a suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester Arena, England, in May 2017.

The Islamic State-Khorasan, founded in 2015 by disaffected members of the Pakistani Taliban, burst onto the international jihadi scene after the Taliban toppled the Afghan government in 2021. During the U.S. military withdrawal from the country, ISIS-K carried out a suicide bombing at the international airport in Kabul in August 2021 that killed 13 U.S. service members and as many as 170 civilians.

Since then, the Taliban have been fighting ISIS-K in Afghanistan. So far, the Taliban’s security services have prevented the group from seizing territory or recruiting large numbers of former Taliban fighters, according to U.S. counterterrorism officials.

But the upward arc and scope of ISIS-K’s attacks have increased in recent years, with cross-border strikes into Pakistan and a growing number of plots in Europe. Most of those European plots were thwarted, prompting Western intelligence assessments that the group might have reached the lethal limits of its capabilities.

In July, Germany and the Netherlands coordinated arrests targeting seven Tajik, Turkmen and Kyrgyz individuals linked to a ISIS-K network who were suspected of plotting attacks in Germany.

Three men were arrested in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia over alleged plans to attack the Cologne Cathedral on New Year’s Eve 2023. The raids were linked to three other arrests in Austria and one in Germany on Dec. 24. The four people were reportedly acting in support of ISIS-K.

U.S. and other Western counterterrorism officials say these plots were organized by low-level operatives who were detected and thwarted relatively quickly.

“Thus far, ISIS-Khorasan has relied primarily on inexperienced operatives in Europe to try to advance attacks in its name,” Christine Abizaid, head of the National Counterterrorism Center, told a House committee in November.

But there are worrisome signs that ISIS-K is learning from its mistakes. In January, masked assailants attacked a Roman Catholic church in Istanbul, killing one person. Shortly afterward, the Islamic State group, through its official Amaq News Agency, claimed responsibility. Turkish law enforcement forces detained 47 people, most of them Central Asian nationals.

Since then, Turkish security forces have launched mass counteroperations against Islamic State group suspects in Turkey, Syria and Iraq. Several European investigations shed light on the global and interconnected nature of Islamic State group finances, according to a United Nations report in January, which identified Turkey as a logistical hub for ISIS-K operations in Europe.

The Moscow and Iran attacks demonstrated more sophistication, counterterrorism officials said, suggesting a greater level of planning and an ability to tap into local extremist networks.

“ISIS-K has been fixated on Russia for the past two years,” frequently criticizing President Vladimir Putin in its propaganda, said Colin Clarke, a counterterrorism analyst at the Soufan Group, a security consulting firm based in New York. “ISIS-K accuses the Kremlin of having Muslim blood in its hands, referencing Moscow’s interventions in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Syria.”

A significant portion of ISIS-K’s members are of Central Asian origin, and there is a large contingent of Central Asians living and working in Russia. Some of these individuals may have become radicalized and been in position to serve in a logistical function, stockpiling weapons, Clarke said.

Daniel Byman, a counterterrorism specialist at Georgetown University, said that “ISIS-K has gathered fighters from Central Asia and the Caucasus under its wing, and they may be responsible for the Moscow attack, either directly or via their own networks.”

Russian and Iranian authorities apparently did not take seriously enough public and more detailed private U.S. warnings of imminent ISIS-K attack plotting, or were distracted by other security challenges.

“In early March, the U.S. government shared information with Russia about a planned terrorist attack in Moscow,” Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, said Saturday. “We also issued a public advisory to Americans in Russia on March 7. ISIS bears sole responsibility for this attack. There was no Ukrainian involvement whatsoever.”

Russian authorities Saturday announced the arrest of several suspects in Friday’s attack. But senior U.S. officials said Sunday that they were still digging into the background of the assailants and trying to determine whether they were deployed from South or Central Asia for this specific attack or if they were already in the country as part of the network of supporters that ISIS-K then engaged and encouraged.

Counterterrorism specialists voiced concern Sunday that the attacks in Moscow and Iran might embolden ISIS-K to redouble its efforts to strike in Europe, particularly in France, Belgium, Britain and other countries that have been hit on and off for the past decade.

The U.N. report, using a different name for Islamic State Khorasan, said “some individuals of North Caucasus and Central Asian origin traveling from Afghanistan or Ukraine toward Europe represent an opportunity for ISIL-K, which seeks to project violent attacks in the West.” The report concluded that there was evidence of “current and unfinished operational plots on European soil conducted by ISIL-K.”

A senior Western intelligence official identified three main drivers that could inspire ISIS-K operatives to attack: the existence of dormant cells in Europe, images of the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip and support from Russian-speaking people living in Europe.

One major event this summer has many counterterrorism officials on edge.

“I worry about the Paris Olympics,” said Edmund Fitton-Brown, a former top U.N. counterterrorism official who is now a senior adviser to the Counter Extremism Project. “They would be a premium terrorist target.”

c.2024 The New York Times Company

IS-K: Who are the Islamic State jihadists behind Moscow attack?

Frank Gardner - BBC security correspondent
Mon, March 25, 2024 

The Crocus City Hall in Moscow on fire

Despite attempts by President Vladimir Putin and Russia's state-controlled media to pin the blame for Friday's deadly Moscow theatre attack on Ukraine, more details are emerging about the jihadist group IS-K that has claimed it was behind it.
Who or what is IS-K?

IS-K is an abbreviation of Islamic State-Khorasan. It is a regional affiliate of the globally proscribed terror Islamic State group focused on Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan.

The group has given itself the name Khorasan as that was part of an historic Islamic caliphate spanning those countries, as well as northward into Central Asia.

IS-K has been around for nine years but in recent months it has emerged as the most dangerous branch of the Islamic State group, with a long reach and a reputation for extreme brutality and cruelty.

Along with what is left of the group's wider leadership in Syria and Iraq, IS-K aspires to a pan-national Islamic caliphate ruled through an ultra-strict interpretation of Sharia, Islamic law.

In Afghanistan it is waging a sporadic but still deadly insurgency against the country's rulers, the Taliban, who it opposes on ideological grounds.
Has IS-K carried out attacks before?

It targeted the chaotic evacuation from Kabul airport in 2021 with a suicide bomb, killing 170 Afghans and 13 US servicemen.

The following year it targeted the Russian embassy in Kabul, killing at least six people and injuring others.

Dozens were killed when explosives were detonated among the crowd waiting to board evacuation planes leaving Kabul

The group has carried out indiscriminate attacks on a maternity ward, bus stations and policemen.

In January this year, IS-K carried out a double bombing of a shrine in Kerman, Iran, killing nearly 100 Iranians.

In Russia it has carried out numerous small-scale attacks, the most recent being in 2020 - and already this year the FSB, Russia's internal security service, says it has stopped several terror plots.

Who were the attackers?

According to Russian state media the four men captured and charged are all Tajiks from the Central Asian republic of Tajikistan, which used to be part of the Soviet Union.

It is obvious from their battered and bruised appearance in court that they have been especially harshly interrogated to the point of torture.

The problem with that is according to international norms, their confessions will be worthless - people will say anything to make the pain stop, including confessing to a narrative that is simply untrue.

Dalerdzhon Mirzoyev, one of the suspects, appeared in court with visible injuries

Reports have emerged that one of the men was seen carrying out surveillance of the venue in early March, around the time the US warned Russia there was an imminent threat of a terrorist attack on a public space - a warning the Kremlin dismissed at the time as "propaganda".

Another report says at least two of the attackers arrived in Russia recently, implying that this was a "hit team" sent by IS-K, rather than a sleeper cell of residents.
Why did they target Russia?

There are several reasons.

IS-K consider most of the world to be their enemies. Russia is high up on their list, along with the US, Europe, Israel, Jews, Christians, Shia Muslims, the Taliban and all rulers of Muslim-majority states, who they consider to be "apostates".

Islamic State's hostility to Russia goes back to the Chechen wars in the 1990s and early 2000s, when Moscow's forces devastated the Chechen capital Grozny.

More recently, Russia entered the Syrian civil war on the side of its ally, President Bashar al-Assad, and the Russian air force has carried out countless bombings of rebel and civilian positions, killing large numbers of Islamic State group and Al-Qaeda-linked fighters.

In Afghanistan, IS-K view Russia as being an ally of the Taliban, which is why they attacked the Russian embassy in Kabul in 2022.

Moscow attack: Debunking the false claims


Steve Rosenberg: As Russia mourns, how will Putin react?


Bullets and panic - the Moscow concert that became a massacre

They also bear a grudge for the 10 years of brutal Soviet occupation of that country from 1979-89.

Then there is the situation inside Russia itself.

Russia is viewed by IS-K as very much a Christian country and their video posted after the Moscow attack talks about killing Christians.

Tajik and other Central Asian migrant workers are sometimes subject to a degree of harassment and suspicion by the FSB as it seeks to head off terrorist attacks.

Finally, Russia - a nation currently distracted by its full-scale war with its neighbour Ukraine - may simply have been a convenient target of opportunity for IS-K, a place where weapons were available and their enemy's guard was down.

What do we still not know?

There remain a number of unanswered questions about this whole episode.

For example, why were the attackers able to wander at will for nearly an hour around the Crocus Hall with absolutely no apparent sense of urgency?

In a country where the police and special services, notably the FSB, are omnipresent, these gunmen behaved as if they knew they were not going to be interrupted by a police SWAT team.

Russia's extensive security services were not able to stop the attack

Then there are the weapons - not just handguns but powerful, modern automatic assault rifles. How were they able to acquire these and smuggle them undetected into the venue?

Their swift capture is also surprising.

Unlike many jihadist gunmen on a raid like this, these men were not wearing suicide vests or belts, in the manner of those who prefer death to capture.

And yet, it did not take long for the Russian authorities - the same Russian authorities who failed to stop the worst terror plot in 20 years unfolding beneath their noses - to round up the suspects and put them on trial.

All this is prompting some analysts to speculate about some sort of so-called "inside job" by the Kremlin, or a "false flag operation" to garner popular support for the war on Ukraine.

However, there is no hard evidence to support that theory and US intelligence has confirmed that in their view, it was Islamic State behind this hideous attack.

Why ISIS-K Hates Putin—and Went After Moscow

Fred Kaplan

SLATE
Mon, March 25, 2024 



It should have been no surprise that the terrorist group known as ISIS was behind Friday night’s massive attack on a concert hall in Moscow, killing 137 people and injuring at least 100.

The surprise is that this sort of thing doesn’t happen more often.

ISIS, also called the Islamic State, was believed dead and gone in 2017, after U.S., Iraqi, and Kurdish forces defeated its final holdout of armed men in a ferocious battle around the Iraqi town of Mosul. The terrorist group—which, for the previous few years, had ruled as many as 12 million people in a self-declared “caliphate” spanning much of northwestern Iraq and eastern Syria—was obliterated as a political and military power, but a few thousand of its fanatics survived.

Many Western articles and analyses painted ISIS as an especially violent offshoot of al-Qaida bent on wiping out or overthrowing territories held by “apostates” of all sorts—Christians, Jews, and rival Shiite Muslims. But the group also singled out Russia as a particularly virulent enemy.

Since the fall of 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been helping Syrian President Bashar al-Assad fight off all opposition factions in a gruesome civil war, sending him not just bombs and ammo but fighter planes flown by Russian air force pilots. ISIS fighters have been among the targets of these bombing raids—and they have sought revenge.

Bruce Hoffman, a counterterrorism expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me Monday that since the caliphate’s collapse in Mosul, many ISIS survivors have been animated most of all by the crusade against Russia.

Not long after Putin began his deployment, ISIS militants in Egypt claimed responsibility for planting a bomb on a charter flight to St. Petersburg, killing 224 passengers, all of them Russian tourists returning home. In 2017 an ISIS suicide bomber blew up a subway car in the St. Petersburg metro system, killing 16.

The metro bomber was from Kyrgyzstan, one of the former Soviet Union’s Central Asian republics. The four men arrested after this past Friday’s concert-hall killings were from Tajikistan, another former republic in the same region. The fact is no coincidence. The majority of this region’s citizens are Muslim. Many of them resent Russia for its tyrannical grip from Soviet times (animated, in the case of its hold over Muslim areas, by white-nationalist racism). Some residents of these countries have been further radicalized by Islamist terrorist groups, which flourished with the rise of al-Qaida and ISIS. And according to Hoffman, many of those who were radicalized and who had been recruited to fight for the caliphate fled back home just before or after the fall of Mosul.

The concert-hall killing in Moscow was planned and carried out by a branch of the terrorist movement called ISIS-K. (The K stands for the Khorasan region, which overlaps parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and Turkmenistan.) ISIS-K has been fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan; it regards the Taliban leaders, who took over Afghanistan in 2017 after U.S. forces withdrew and the Kabul government collapsed, as insufficiently militant.

Still, the group has stepped up terrorist activities outside its home area.

In January, two ISIS-K suicide bombers killed 84 Iranian Shiites who were attending a memorial service for Qassem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s terrorist operations throughout the Middle East, on the fourth anniversary of his assassination. The success of that attack might have encouraged the Moscow attack a little over two months later.

In the first decade of this century, after the Soviet collapse and its own withdrawal from an earlier war in Afghanistan, the Kremlin was very concerned about the rise of radical Islam in the Central Asian republics. For that reason, even Putin, for a while anyway, was keen to help the United States after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks—sharing intelligence about al-Qaida and urging Central Asian leaders to let the U.S. military use their airfields to service and resupply our own invasion of Afghanistan.

However, after Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and especially since Russia’s outright invasion of Ukraine in 2022, contacts between Washington and Moscow have broken off.

Twice this month, in accordance with a long-standing policy known as “duty to warn,” U.S. intelligence officials notified their Russian counterparts of a report that ISIS-K was planning a terrorist attack in Russia. Putin waved away the warning as “an attempt to frighten and destabilize our society.”

By coincidence, shortly after the Americans’ first warning, Russia’s Federal Security Service stopped an impending attack on a Moscow synagogue. It is possible that Putin or his aides thought that this was the attack in the U.S. duty-to-warn notice (which, in any case, did not contain any details about when or where a terrorist strike might take place).

Russian intelligence and security forces were probably also shorthanded, as the vast majority of them have been diverted to—or distracted by—the war in Ukraine. Large concert halls are particularly ripe targets—and the Crocus City Hall in Krasnogorsk, the northwestern district of Moscow where this attack took place, is a vast mall that includes a hotel, restaurants, and a few music venues. It would be very difficult for even the most fully staffed and scrupulous security team to check every person and every bag entering its main doors.

Nonetheless, it was clear Putin was caught off guard. He remained silent for several hours after the attack. When he finally emerged, he spoke on a televised broadcast for a mere five minutes, made no mention of ISIS, and came close to blaming the incident on Ukraine. First, he likened the perpetrators to “Nazis,” a term he often uses to describe the officials in Kyiv. Second, he said that, whoever they were, they were fleeing toward Ukraine, where they would be received with open arms. (Ukraine denies any involvement in the attack. ISIS-K has openly claimed responsibility.)

It is not known whether the four men arrested were the only ones who took part in the attack—or even whether all four of these men actually did. After confessing to the crime, they appeared in Russian court in a clearly beaten state, some with bruises and swollen faces, one sitting unconscious in a wheelchair.

Will the attack damage Putin politically? Some think so. It is the deadliest terrorist attack in Russia in 20 years. Many Russians have ceded to Putin’s domestic oppression, even to his war, reasoning that at least he has kept the country safe and strong. The concert-hall attack delivers a sucker punch to that notion—especially when viewed alongside a spate of attacks on Russian oil refineries, railway depots, and other high-profile targets, launched either by Ukrainians who surreptitiously crossed the border or by Russian saboteurs.

Then again, Putin has survived a plethora of plots, threats, and horrid situations that would have knocked many other dictators out of power or worse. He may survive this one as well, and may even exploit it—as he has done in the wake of terrorist attacks in the past—to intensify his campaigns against enemies domestic and foreign, imagined and real.

Putin’s grip on power is at once tenacious and vulnerable, just as Russia itself acts at times like a rapacious empire and, at others, like a ramshackle cogwheel spinning out of control and about to implode. The combination—when it comes to both the man and his fiefdom—can be dangerous.


What is ISIS-K, the group claiming the Moscow concert attack?

Reuters Videos
Updated Mon, March 25, 2024 


STORY: On March 22, armed men burst into this concert hall near Moscow, killing at least 137 people and wounding more than 180 in one the deadliest attacks in Russia.

ISIS-K – the Afghan branch of Islamic State militant group – says it was behind the attack.

Russia has cast doubts over claim, while the United States says it has intelligence confirming it.

Here’s what we know about ISIS-K, and their motives for attacking Russia.

Islamic State Khorasan - or ISIS-K - is named after an old term for the region that included parts of Afghanistan, Iran and Turkmenistan.

The group emerged in eastern Afghanistan in late 2014 and quickly established a reputation for extreme brutality.

Its leader, 29-year-old Sanaullah Ghafari, has overseen its transformation into one of the most fearsome branches of the global Islamist network.

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

In 2021, it grabbed global attention with a suicide bombing on Kabul international airport during the U.S. military withdrawal.

The attack killed 13 U.S. soldiers and scores of civilians.

In September 2022, it claimed responsibility for a deadly suicide attack at the Russian embassy in Kabul.

(John Kirby, U.S. National Security spokesperson)

“ISIS-K does remain a viable terrorist threat.”

Perhaps its most brazen operation to date came in January 2024,

with twin bombings that killed nearly 100 people in Iran.

Senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies Dan Byman:

"ISIS-K has several thousand fighters, is the general estimate, and it was largely believed to be more of a guerrilla group that did the occasional terrorist attack, but largely focused on Afghanistan. However, recently there were also some plots that European intelligence claims still disrupted, so they seem to be shifting from being a regional group to doing more attacks further afield, whether it's in Moscow or in Europe."

Security experts say ISIS-K has been fixated on Russia for the past two years.

The group criticizes Russian President Vladimir Putin for changing the course of the Syrian civil war by supporting President Bashar al-Assad against Islamic State.

ISIS-K has also been aggressively recruiting ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks across Central Asia,

who have their own grievances against Moscow.

"So, Russia is a long-standing enemy of the broader jihadist community if you go way back to the, of course, the struggle in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. Fast forward a bit and Russia, of course, backed Syria during the civil war and the Islamic State was on the other side of that. So, Russia is seen as working with Syria, fighting Muslims and the caucuses in Central Asia. So, both the group in particular, but also the broader community are very anti-Russian."

The Islamic State's Moscow Massacre

Liz Wolfe
Mon, March 25, 2024 

A couple mourns at a spontaneous memorial to the victims of the terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall, organized at the entrance to the Tekhnologichesky Institute metro station in St. Petersburg. | Artem Priakhin/SOPA Images/Sipa USA/Newscom

137 dead: Over the weekend, gunmen affiliated with Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K)—an offshoot founded in 2015, mostly comprised of malcontent Taliban militants—opened fire on a Moscow concert hall where the band Picnic was playing. They killed 137 people and injured 180 more, and they also set the concert hall on fire. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack; Russian news media immediately started blaming Ukraine, claiming the West was lying about who is responsible.

The four suspects, who have been arrested, are men from Tajikistan who were in Russia as migrant workers. Russian President Vladimir Putin alleged the men "were heading toward Ukraine" to seek refuge after carrying out their attack.

"During the U.S. military withdrawal from the country, ISIS-K carried out a suicide bombing at the international airport in Kabul in August 2021 that killed 13 U.S. service members and as many as 170 civilians," reports The New York Times. ISIS-K has, up until now, been widely regarded as ineffective; the group has plotted several attacks in Europe—notably one on the cathedral in Köln, Germany, for New Years Eve 2023—yet has mostly been thwarted before they've had the opportunity to carry them out.

Trump goes to court (again): Former President Donald Trump will appear in a Manhattan court today to "seek another delay of his criminal trial on charges that he covered up a sex scandal that could have derailed his stunning victory in the 2016 presidential election," per The New York Times.

There was a recent delay in this case, after new evidence was made available and the judge decided that Trump's lawyers needed a 30-day extension to review it. (Trump asked for either a 90-day extension or a thrown-out case.)

But Trump is also facing imminent financial trouble, from needing to either settle up in the civil fraud case—also in New York—or go the appeals route, which would require him to secure a half-billion-dollar bond. If Trump does not secure that bond, the state attorney general, Letitia James, will most likely start freezing Trump's bank accounts and seizing some of his assets. (He already secured a $91.6 million bond needed for another case—the defamation suit brought by E. Jean Carroll—but is struggling to do so for this much larger amount.)

Appeal bonds, like the one Trump is seeking, are "document[s] in which a company guarantees the. judgment, plus interest, should [a client] lose his appeal and fail to pay," says the Times. "Mr. Trump would need to pledge significant collateral to a bond company—about $557 million, his lawyers said—including as much cash as possible, as well as stocks and bonds he could sell quickly." He would also incur a roughly $20 million fee owed to the bond company.


Why is Islamic State targeting Russia?

Elliott Goat, The Week UK
Mon, March 25, 2024 

Illustration of a shooting target in the colours of the Russian flag, partially burnt and marked with bullet holes.

Opportunity as well as ideology is likely to have led Islamic State's Afghan off-shoot to select Moscow as the target for Friday's deadly terror attack, experts say.

Despite an immediate claim of responsibility from IS, Vladimir Putin has sought to deflect blame to Ukraine for the attack at the Crocus City Hall music venue that left at least 137 people dead and hundreds more injured.

But "from the outset", said Gavin Mortimer in The Spectator, it was "obvious to seasoned observers" who was behind the massacre. The attackers "cleaved to the same ideology as those who have this century murdered thousands of innocent men, women and children in New York, Bali, Madrid, London, Brussels, Paris, Manchester and Nice".

And with Russia's security services distracted by the Ukraine conflict and domestic opposition to the war, the Islamists seized the chance to target Moscow.
What did the commentators say?

Islamic State Khorasan Province (IS-K) is the branch of IS that has "most consistently and energetically" attempted terrorist attacks across Europe, including in Russia, said Greg Barton, chair of global Islamic politics at Deakin University in Melbourne, on The Conversation.

Both IS in general and IS-K in particular have a long list of grievances against Russia. They cite the Soviet Union's occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s; a crackdown on Muslim minorities in the North Caucasus; Russia's wars in Chechnya; and the crucial role Moscow played in propping up Bashar al-Assad's regime during Syria's decade-long civil war.

Russia is of "particular interest" to IS and is "targeted because it claims President Vladimir Putin and his regime are killing Muslims", said Sky News.

The Nord Ost theatre siege in 2002 and the Beslan massacre in 2004 were the most notorious attacks by Islamist groups inside Russia, and the threat of another large-scale incident had been growing in recent years.

The FSB, Russia's security service, announced earlier this month that it had foiled an attack by IS-K on a synagogue in Kaluga, southwest of Moscow. The US embassy in Russia subsequently warned that it was "monitoring reports that extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow, to include concerts".

But it was also "likely opportunity and personnel that led the group to select a soft target in Moscow", said Barton on The Conversation. The majority of IS-K militants arrested across Europe, including in Russia, over the past two years have been Russian nationals or people from Central Asia with links to Russia.

IS-K "has even rolled out a Russian-language propaganda wing", Lucas Webber, co-founder of MilitantWire, which produces analysis of militant activity, told the Financial Times (FT). "It has placed heavy focus on inciting supporters to carry out attacks against Russia."

Vera Mironova, an associate fellow at the Davis Center at Harvard University, said the group chose Moscow possibly because it was relatively easy, in contrast to planned attacks in other European countries that have been foiled in recent months. "It's about the convenience of the target," she told the FT.

The group will have hoped to "sow chaos in Russia at a time when it is fighting a war in Ukraine", said Sky News. The attack puts the spotlight back on Russia's security services, and on Putin's promise to deliver "peace and stability" following his election for a fifth term.

The FSB had previously "focused almost entirely on the Islamist terror threat", said the FT, but since 2022 the agency has "shifted its focus" to Ukraine. Those it has accused of "terrorism" have predominantly been Russians protesting against the war, according to an analysis of official statements by the independent Novaya Gazeta Europe newspaper.
What next?

Like all terror groups, IS-K's "grand design is to push people to extremes and to try to elicit an overreaction and overreach", said Sky News.

In the short term, the attack will raise the profile of the group outside central Asia and broaden its recruitment pool.

Putin's response will depend on whether he and his propagandists in the media continue to try to maintain that Ukraine was involved, or instead pivot to accept IS-K's responsibility.

Either way, said Barton, the Kremlin is "likely to respond with a wave of violence, cracking down on Russia's Muslim minority communities in the North Caucasus region and beyond". Friday night's attack in Moscow was "nightmarish", but "sadly the horror is likely to be just the beginning".

PAKISTAN/AFGHANISTAN 

Targeting militant sanctuaries

Zahid Hussain 

DAWN

Published March 20, 2024 


THE long-simmering tension between the two countries now threatens to escalate into a full-blown conflict after Pakistan’s latest air strike on militant sanctuaries inside Afghanistan. The Afghan Taliban regime claims to have retaliated by firing with heavy weapons at Pakistani border security posts. It has now gone beyond a war of words. The latest military actions mark a new low in Pakistan’s relations with the interim Taliban regime.

The current crisis has come after yet another terrorist attack at a security post last week in North Waziristan by a militant group operating from across the border, claiming the lives of seven Pakistani soldiers. Islamabad seems to have lost its patience after this attack. The air strike came a day after Pakistani leaders vowed to take the war to the terrorist sanctuaries across the border. Pakistan has lost more than 300 security personnel to terrorist attacks in the last two years, mainly carried out by the TTP (whose leadership is based in Afghanistan) and its affiliates.

There have been conflicting reports about the casualties. While Pakistan claims to have targeted militants in the air strikes, Kabul says those killed were women and children. A Pakistan Foreign Office statement said the intelligence-based action targeted militants belonging to the Gul Bahadur group believed to have been involved in most of the terrorist attacks, which have escalated in the past two years. One of the most powerful militant commanders, Gul Bahadur has also been closely associated with Al Qaeda.

As per reports, this would not have been the first time that Pakistan conducted air strikes inside Afghanistan. But it has always maintained a degree of plausible deniability. Pakistan last year reportedly bombed targets in the Salala neighbourhood in Nangarhar province, but the Foreign Office rejected the reports. There had also been some reports of Pakistan having carried out cross-border operations to take out militant leaders based in Afghanistan. But there has never been official confirmation of those attacks.

Curiously, Pakistan has now gone public, claiming it conducted the air strikes in the Afghan provinces of Paktika and Khost, which host thousands of militants belonging to various factions of the TTP. It reflects Islamabad’s rising ire over the escalation in terrorist attacks in Pakistan, which have targeted mainly the security forces. Belligerent statements from some Afghan Taliban leaders seem to have also pushed Pakistan into issuing a public warning.


A wider conflagration’s spill-over effects will be disastrous for our internal and external security.

In a statement, Afghanistan’s defence ministry, headed by Mullah Yaqoob, warned Pakistan of serious consequences: “The country’s defence and security forces are ready to respond to any kind of aggression and will defend the country’s territorial integrity in any situation.” The statement also called the Durand Line, which divides the two countries, “artificial”. The Afghan Taliban leaders have repeatedly challenged the legitimacy of the Durand Line. The war of words highlights the worsening tensions between Islamabad and the Kabul regime.

According to Pakistani officials, 5,000 to 6,000 TTP militants have taken shelter in Afghanistan. If their family members are included, the number is in the tens of thousands. Most had fled the army operation in the former tribal regions in 2014. Many of them have also been fighting alongside the Afghan Taliban against foreign forces. The TTP has virtually become an extension of its Afghan counterpart, and it is not surprising that there has been a massive surge in militant activities in Pakistan after the end of America’s war and the return of Taliban rule in Afghanistan.

Pakistan has directly held the Afghan Taliban regime responsible for the terrorist attacks. “The Afghan interim government is not only arming the terrorists but also providing a safe haven for other terrorist organisations as well as being involved in incidents of terrorism in Pakistan,” an ISPR said in a statement after the latest terrorist attack in North Waziristan.

Pakistan has also accused some of the Afghan Taliban commanders of using the TTP as a proxy. It is certainly a grave situation. There has also been strong evidence of the Afghan Taliban being involved with the TTP in conducting cross-border terrorist attacks. Last year, hundreds of militants crossed the border and overran Pakistan’s security posts in Chitral. For the security forces in Pakistan, another primary concern is that of the militants laying their hands on the modern weaponry left behind by Nato troops and the former Afghan army.

Given their long connection and ideological proximity, the Afghan Taliban will not take action against their fellow jihadists. Instead, they insist that Islamabad make peace with the group, which has been responsible for the killing of thousands of people in Pakistan. Indeed, Pakistan has few options after the failure of diplomatic efforts to persuade the Islamic regime to expel the TTP.

Nevertheless, military options have severe repercussions for regional peace. A wider conflagration’s spill-over effects will be disastrous for the country’s internal and external security. Indeed, we must keep up pressure on the Afghan Taliban but should not close doors on diplomatic efforts. Instead of knee-jerk reactions, we must think more rationally.

There is no doubt that the Afghan Taliban’s return to power has been a major contributory factor in the revival of terrorist violence in Pakistan. However, the absence of a coherent strategy on Pakistan’s part has also allowed the TTP to claw back some lost space in the former tribal districts, as has the prevailing law and order situation. Indeed, the policy of appeasement has come back to haunt us.

According to some reports, the TTP fighters are back in many border districts and have set up security check-posts. It is almost a return to the pre-military operation situation — perhaps even worse, as the militants seem to be better organised this time and possess sophisticated weapons.

The attacks against Pakistan’s security forces are being carried out with impunity, raising questions about our strategy to deal with the situation. The growing political and economic instability has also vitalised the militant group. We have to put our own house in order. Unfortunately, we have not learnt any lesson.

The writer is an author and journalist.
zhussain100@yahoo.com
X: @hidhussain

Published in Dawn, March 20th, 2024

 

Tajikistan’s Controversial Roghun Dam 'Too Big to Fail'

By RFE/RL staff - Mar 15, 2024

• Tajikistan prioritizes completing the Roghun dam to address energy shortages.
• The project faces criticism for its environmental impact, high costs, and displacement of residents.
• International institutions are urged to reconsider funding the project due to sustainability concerns.

When it comes to energy bets, Tajikistan is all-in on hydropower.

Having spent much of the last decade and several billion dollars building the Roghun "megadam," the project is clearly too big to fail from the point of view of Tajikistan's leadership.

But amid spiraling costs and long-standing questions about the environmental and human impacts, its critics contend that Roghun is also too big to be sustainable.

Tajikistan is not alone in eying Roghun's potential 3,600 megawatts of installed capacity.

While millions of Tajiks continue to live without power or have it for just a few hours per day, especially in the colder months, Roghun is an important piece of the energy-security puzzle in Tajikistan's electricity-strapped neighborhood, with Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan all potential customers.

So there is a lot at stake.

And that is without considering whether large-scale hydropower is a wise direction for a region where climate change is set to continue the erosion of river-feeding glaciers.

But while some of Tajikistan's Central Asian neighbors are already diverting resources to smaller solar and wind projects to plug their deficits, megadams new and old are still the order of the day for Dushanbe.

Supply Outrunning Demand

On March 9, a delegation from the board of executive directors at the World Bank Group wrapped up a regional tour of Central Asia that included talks in Tajikistan with Roghun's ultimate champion, President Emomali Rahmon, as well as a trip to the dam's partly operational hydropower plant (HPP).

The group's press release gave little in terms of the details of the talks, but they included "a particular focus on climate change within the prism of the water-energy nexus."

The visit came on the back of both negative and positive developments for Tajikistan's power sector.

The negative was a massive and as-yet-unexplained power outage that plunged the vast majority of the country, including the capital, Dushanbe, into darkness for several hours on March 1.

Local media outlet Asia-Plus cited a source that attributed the outage to an "accident" at the Norak HPP that currently supplies around half of Tajikistan's power.

Another outlet, Dushanbe TV, cited a source claiming a "technical accident on the main republican high-voltage lines."

State power company Barki Tojik did not provide RFE/RL's Tajik Service with a comment.

Just days later, on March 4, Deputy Energy and Water Minister Sorbon Kholmuhammadzoda was dismissed. A government decree said he would assume a new post, although it is unclear what that will be.

More encouraging was news issued by the World Bank last month, and confirmed by the Taliban last week, that the all-important Afghan leg of CASA-1000 -- a four-country regional power project in which Tajikistan is expected to play the role of top provider -- is back on track.

CASA-1000 had been de facto suspended since the Taliban's return to power in Afghanistan in 2021, but the World Bank announced it would move forward with financing pylons and other infrastructure in the Afghan section "in a ring-fenced manner" to ensure distance from the radical government that is yet to gain international recognition.

When CASA-1000 eventually becomes reality, Tajikistan should transmit 70 percent of an approximately 1.3 gigawatts of electricity to the power-starved Afghan and Pakistani grids, with Kyrgyzstan due to receive the remainder.

But the power-transportation infrastructure is of little use if Tajikistan doesn't have the spare energy.

With colder-than-usual temperatures recently hitting Central Asia in the final lap of winter, Tajikistan's annual but now worsening power shortages have had some tragic consequences.

In recent weeks, RFE/RL's Tajik Service has reported multiple carbon-monoxide deaths, including of children, as rural families load up their stoves to get through the freezing nights.

And if reports of the Dushanbe blackout being connected to an accident at the Soviet-era Norak HPP are true, that means progress at Roghun -- where only two of six 600-megawatt units are currently online -- cannot come fast enough.

Bulldozing On

In December, Rahmon said he expected the third unit of Roghun to come online in 2025.

His personal attachment to the project is clear. In 2016, when construction began, he clambered into a bulldozer to move earth around the site in a grandiose ground-laying ceremony. Some political subordinates of the long-serving leader have even called for the HPP to take his name.

At the time of its ground-laying, the government's estimate for the total cost was just under $4 billion. Following a long construction delay during the coronavirus pandemic, the most recent government estimate put the project's total cost at $6 billion.

The Italian-based company Webuild (formerly Salini Impregilo) is the project's principal contractor. But there is no clear path to financing the final stages of a facility that Dushanbe wants to be the tallest of its kind in the world at 335 meters.

Norak, which is 300 meters high, once held this honor but was displaced from the top more than a decade ago by China's Jinping-I dam, which has a height of 305 meters.

Roghun has thus far been financed with a combination of state budget funds and borrowed money. The former have been disproportionately large for Central Asia's poorest country, reportedly outweighing all other infrastructural spending.

The latter has included a $500 million, 7.1 percent-yield eurobond issued in 2017, the success of which Reuters hailed as "the latest indication of the undiminished thirst for high-yield debt, even from frontier markets -- so-called because of their poverty and rock-bottom credit scores."

Tajikistan is clearly hoping that international institutions will pick up the rest of the tab.

In a release this month, a group of 17 environment- and government-focused nonprofit organizations -- including the Prague-headquartered watchdog CEE Bankwatch Network -- called on the World Bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and the European Investment Bank to "reconsider" an apparent collective-funding pledge of up to $600 million to support Roghun, branding the project's current Environmental and Social Impact Assessment unfit for its purpose.

The coalition had in February referred to Roghun as "a sad reminder of the Soviet ideology of exerting total control over nature," while pointing out that at least 46,000 people would have to be displaced for a dam that it said might not reach full operational capacity until 2040.

"The development of the [Roghun] HPP project on the Vakhsh River is of great concern due to its enormous associated social and environmental risks, not only to Tajikistan but to the region as a whole," the organizations wrote.

One important former Roghun critic has in recent years become a cautious supporter.

That is partly because Tajikistan's downstream neighbor Uzbekistan -- a water-stressed country of around 35 million people -- has prioritized better regional relations under President Shavkat Mirziyoev than did his late, hard-line predecessor, Islam Karimov.

But it is also because Uzbekistan is increasingly unsure which it needs more -- water or electricity -- with deliveries from Tajikistan potentially easing one of those problems.

Tajikistan, for its part, has begun talking up other "green technologies" to plug its deficits.

But in comparison to the region's renewable pacesetters, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan -- which are also mulling nuclear power -- this appears to currently be little more than an idea.

At the Effective Energy In Tajikistan conference in Dushanbe in October, Tajik officials said solar and wind energy could contribute up to 70 megawatts to Tajikistan's energy mix by 2030.

But then-Deputy Energy and Water Minister Kholmuhammadzoda was clear what the government's priority was. "In the next seven years, energy [production] capacity in Tajikistan will increase by an additional 4,000 megawatts of electricity due to the commissioning of the Roghun hydroelectric power station and the reconstruction of other hydroelectric power stations, such as Norak, Sarband and Kairakkum," he said.

So it's hydro or bust. Or perhaps, "hydro and bust."

By RFEE/RL