Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has until now refrained from commenting on the claim by the Islamic State (IS) group for the attack which left 137 dead on Friday in a concert hall in the suburbs of Moscow, for the first time, on Monday March 25, attributed the attack in Moscow to “radical Islamists”.

If he still links it to “attacks by the Kiev regime against Russia” – while Kiev has denied any involvement in the attack – official media have revealed that the attackers of the Crocus City Hall are from Tajikistan, a former -Soviet republic of Central Asia with around ten million inhabitants, predominantly Muslim.

On Sunday, Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon said in a telephone conversation with his Russian counterpart that "terrorists have no nationality, no homeland, no religion." For its part, the Kremlin simply announced that “close” cooperation between the two countries in the field of the fight against terrorism would “intensify”.

A breeding ground for jihadists

David Gaüzère, associate researcher at the French Intelligence Research Center and president of the Center for Observation of Central Asian Societies (COSAC), says he is hardly surprised to see Tajik jihadists on the front line of a terrorist attack of this magnitude. magnitude.

“It must be recognized that Tajikistan has been facing the radicalization of a certain part of its population for more than a decade, inside the country or abroad, to the point that we find Tajiks among the fighters elite of Daesh [Arabic acronym for IS], he recalls. Some were even part of the close guard of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the group's first self-proclaimed caliph."

Geographical location of Tajikistan. © Studio Graphique France Médias Monde

Tajikistan, like the other former Soviet republics of Central Asia, "is a breeding ground for jihadists", underlines Wassim Nasr, journalist specializing in jihadist movements at France 24.

“Historically, this region has been very impacted by the recruitment campaigns of jihadist groups, even before the creation of ISIS and the establishment of its caliphate in Syria and Iraq

,

” he adds. At the time, we noted an influx of entire families of several dozen people from these Central Asian countries towards territories controlled by ISIS from 2013."

In 2017, the International Crisis Group (ICG) think tank estimated that between 2,000 and 4,000 nationals from Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan had joined the ranks of ISIS in Iraq and Syria. A contingent of fighters, but also some leading executives.

“

Senior IS commanders from Central Asia have managed to rise in rank thanks to their military skills, sometimes acquired during the Soviet era,” explains Wassim Nasr. Others have even benefited from training in anti-terrorist fight offered... by the Americans, like former Colonel Gulmurod Khalimov, a Tajik special forces commander who joined the ranks of ISIS in 2015 and called on his compatriots to follow him in a video."

Recovery of the Vigipirate plan in France

Closer to Syria and Iraq, the establishment in Afghanistan, near the Pakistani border, of the Islamic State group in Khorasan (EI-K), "created, from 2015, a new regional fixation point for aspiring IS jihadists", specifies Wassim Nasr.

Founded by senior members of the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban who pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, this branch of IS has openly designated Russia as a target.

She is suspected by American intelligence of being responsible for the Moscow attack. As early as March 7, the U.S. Embassy in Russia warned its citizens that it was “closely monitoring reports that extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow, including concerts.”

After the March 22 attack, Washington said it had communicated this information directly to Moscow, according to reports from the New York Times.

On Monday, Emmanuel Macron indicated that the French intelligence services also believe that this entity “fomented this attack and carried it out”. The French executive took note, during a meeting on Sunday evening at the Élysée, of the fact that "this particular group which is involved, it seems, in this attack, had carried out several attempts in recent months on our own soil", even specified the head of state. Hence the decision, taken on Sunday, to raise the Vigipirate security plan to its highest level in France.

A Tajik regime on borrowed time

?

The Moscow attack reveals, according to David Gaüzère, that IS has been revitalized and displays the ability to strike wherever it wishes thanks to its different branches, such as EI-K.

“Which means that each state, even France, needs to raise the level of security and this is what was done on Sunday, he confides. Even Tajikistan is not spared from the threat jihadist."

He recalls that in July 2018, several Western cyclists were attacked and killed near Danghara, southeast of the capital Dushanbe. In 2019, a revolt in Vakhdat prison, about ten kilometers from the capital, was led by the son of Gulmurod Khalimov, considered the “Minister of War of Daesh in Syria”.

The specialist, author of a work entitled "The Green Cauldron of Central Asian Islam" (Éditions l'Harmattan), also believes that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a factor which revived activity and jihadist threat in the region.

“Since the end of the USSR, Russia has controlled the Tajik-Afghan border thanks to the deployment of the 201st motorized rifle division – almost 7,000 men – to prevent the passage of Afghan terrorists into Tajikistan, recalls II. However, the Kremlin stripped this garrison to send soldiers to Ukraine, which made the border more porous and therefore the situation more favorable for jihadist cells to infiltrate and operate on Tajik soil or in Russian-speaking states, including Russia."

A strategic situation which worries the authoritarian regime of President Emomali Rakhmon, in power since 2012, already considered by experts as the weak link in the region in the face of the jihadist threat.

"If their final objective remains the founding of their global caliphate, in the meantime, locally, the Tajik jihadists seek to overthrow the power in place in order to establish an Islamist state, estimates David Gaüzère. However, Emomali Rakhmon's support base is today so narrow that the president is even contested within his own clan. We could see on the papers which were presented by the Russian authorities that the suspects arrested after the attack in Moscow came from the Kulyab region [south of Tajikistan, Editor's note], where the Tajik president comes from."

And to conclude: "His exhausted dictatorial regime is still in place only because of its brutality and because it is supported by Russia, and it is certain that even if Putin one day leaves power naturally and not not violent, it would collapse a few weeks later and would have a good chance of leaving the country prey to Islamism."

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