Islamic State militants pass a checkpoint bearing the group’s trademark black flag in the village of Maryam Begg in Kirkuk, 290km north of Baghdad, Iraq. File
| Photo Credit: AP

Islamic State fighters have killed nearly 4,100 people in Syria since 2019 when the jihadists lost their last stronghold in the country, a war monitor said on June 29.

IS overran large swathes of Syria and Iraq in 2014, proclaiming a so-called caliphate and launching a reign of terror in June of that year.

In March 2019, the jihadist group lost its last scraps of Syrian territory in a Kurdish-led military campaign backed by a US-led coalition, but remnants continue to launch deadly attacks from desert hideouts.

IS fighters “have killed about 4,100 people in more than 2,550 operations in areas controlled by the regime or” the semi-autonomous Kurdish administration since 2019, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said in a report.

Most of the victims are soldiers, government loyalists and Kurdish-led fighters, but the toll also incudes 627 civilians, the Britain-based Observatory said.

More than half of the 4,085 victims fell in Syria’s vast Badia desert, which runs from the outskirts of Damascus to the Iraqi border.

A total of “2,744 people have been killed by the IS group since its formal collapse in 2019, in various areas of the Syrian desert,” said the monitor, which relies on a network of sources inside the country.

IS fighters have killed more than 2,500 government loyalists and soldiers in the Badia since their so-called caliphate fell, according to the Observatory.

“Hardly a day goes by without bombings, ambushes, targeted operations or surprise attacks” by the jihadists in the region, the report said.

“These operations are met with periodic security campaigns carried out by regime forces and groups loyal to them deep in the desert, with… Russian warplanes targeting the desert on a near-daily basis,” it added.

The group has sustained heavy damage, losing more than 2,000 fighters including top leaders since 2019, the report found.

A United Nations report released in January said IS’s combined strength in Iraq and Syria was between 3,000 and 5,000 fighters, with the Badia serving as a logistics and operations hub for the group in Syria.

Syria’s war has killed more than half a million people and displaced millions more since it broke out in March 2011 with Damascus’s brutal repression of anti-government protests.

Moscow:

Two prison guards at a jail in southern Russia have been freed without harm after they were taken hostage by Islamic State inmates, with the assailants “liquidated”, the country’s prison service said Sunday.

“During a special operation… the criminals were liquidated and the employees taken hostage were freed and were not wounded,” the service said in a statement.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Members of the Russian Emergencies Ministry carry out search-and-rescue operations at the Crocus City Hall concert venue after a shooting attack and fire, outside Moscow, Russia, on March 24, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Russia on May 24 admitted for the first time that Islamic State coordinated the deadly concert hall attack in Moscow in March.

Moscow concert hall shooting updates

“In the course of the investigation… it has been established that the preparations, the financing, the attack and the retreat of the terrorists were coordinated via the internet by members of Khorasan Province (IS-K),” a branch of IS active in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Alexander Bortnikov, the head of FSB, was quoted as saying by the RIA Novosti news agency.

IS has claimed responsibility on multiple occasions for the March 22 attack which killed more than 140 people, but Moscow has repeatedly tried to link Ukraine and the West to the attack.

Cairo:

Islamic State on Sunday claimed responsibility for an attack by gunmen on tourists in Afghanistan’s central Bamiyan province, the group said on its Telegram channel.

Three Spanish tourists were killed and at least one Spaniard was injured in the attack, Spain’s foreign ministry said on Friday.

Taliban interior ministry spokesperson Abdul Mateen Qaniee said four people had been arrested over the attack in which gunmen opened fire. In addition to the three foreign tourists, one Afghan citizen had been killed in the attack. Four foreigners and three Afghans were also injured, he added.

Mountainous Bamiyan is home to a UNESCO world heritage site and the remains of two giant Buddha statues that were blown up by the Taliban during their previous rule in 2001.

Since taking over Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban have pledged to restore security and encourage a small but growing number of tourists trickling back into the country. They have sold tickets to see the site of the destroyed Buddha statues.

Friday’s attack was among the most serious targeting foreign citizens since foreign forces left and the Taliban took over in 2021.

The Islamic State claimed an attack that injured Chinese citizens at a hotel popular with Chinese businessmen in Kabul in 2022.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Islamic State group militants killed at least 15 Syrian pro-government fighters on Friday after they attacked three military positions in the Syrian desert, a war monitor said.

It is the latest attack of its kind by remnants of the jihadists.

They “attacked three military sites belonging to regime forces and fighters loyal to them… in the eastern Homs countryside, triggering armed clashes… and killing 15” pro-government fighters, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

IS overran large swathes of Syria and Iraq in 2014, proclaiming a so-called caliphate and launching a reign of terror.

It was defeated territorially in Syria in 2019, but its remnants continue to carry out deadly attacks, particularly against pro-government forces and Kurdish-led fighters in the vast desert.

IS remnants are also active in neighbouring Iraq.

Last month, IS group fighters killed 28 Syrian soldiers and affiliated pro-government forces in two attacks on government-held areas of Syria, the Observatory said.

Many were members of the Quds Brigade, a group comprising Palestinian fighters that has received support from Damascus ally Moscow in recent years, according to the Observatory, which has a network of sources inside Syria.

In one of those attacks, the jihadists fired on a military bus in eastern Homs province, the Observatory said at the time.

Separately, six Syrian soldiers died in an IS attack against a base in eastern Syria, it added.

Syria’s war has claimed the lives of more than half a million people and displaced millions more since it erupted in March 2011 with Damascus’s brutal repression of anti-government protests.

It then pulled in foreign powers, militias and jihadists.

In late March, IS militants “executed” eight Syrian soldiers after an ambush, the monitor said at that time.

The jihadists also target people hunting desert truffles, a delicacy which can fetch high prices in the war-battered economy.

The Observatory in March said IS had killed at least 11 truffle hunters by detonating a bomb as their car passed in the desert of Raqa province in northern Syria.

In separate unrest in the country, Syria’s defence ministry earlier on Friday said eight soldiers had been injured in Israeli air strikes near Damascus.

The Observatory said Israel had struck a government building in the Damascus countryside that has been used by Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah group since 2014.

The Israeli military has carried out hundreds of strikes in Syria since the outbreak of Syria’s civil war, mainly targeting army positions and Iran-backed fighters.

Picture for representation purpose only.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

“A gunman stormed a mosque in western Afghanistan and killed six people,” a government spokesman said on April 30.

Interior Ministry spokesman Abdul Mateen Qani said that on Monday around 9 p.m. (1630 GMT) “an unknown armed person shot at civilian worshippers in a mosque” in Herat province’s Guzara district.

“Six civilians were martyred and one civilian was injured,” he wrote on social media platform X early Tuesday morning.

The state-run Bakhtar News Agency gave the same death toll for the attack, which took place in a district just south of the provincial capital of Herat city. Citing local sources, domestic media channel Tolo reported the mosque belonged to Afghanistan’s minority Shiite community.

While no group has yet claimed the attack, the regional chapter of Islamic State (IS) is the largest security threat in Afghanistan and has frequently targeted Shiite communities.

The Taliban government has pledged to protect religious and ethnic minorities since returning to power in August 2021, but rights monitors say they’ve done little to make good on that promise.

The most notorious attack linked to IS since the Taliban takeover was in 2022, when at least 53 people — including 46 girls and young women — where slain in the suicide bombing of an education centre.

Taliban officials blamed IS for the attack, which was staged in a Shiite neighbourhood of Kabul. Kabul’s new rulers claim to have ousted IS from Afghanistan and are highly sensitive to suggestions the group has found safe haven in the country since the withdrawal of foreign forces.

Taliban authorities have frequently given death tolls lower than other sources after bombings and gun attacks, in an apparent attempt to downplay security threats.

A United Nations Security Council report released in January said there had been a decrease in IS attacks in Afghanistan because of “counter-terrorism efforts by the Taliban”.

But the report said IS still had “substantial” recruitment in the country and that the militant group had “the ability to project a threat into the region and beyond”.

The Islamic State chapter spanning Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia claimed responsibility for the March attack on the Crocus City Hall concert venue in Moscow, killing more than 140 people. It was the deadliest attack in Russia in two decades.

In June 2015, a few months after the Islamic State (IS) announced its Wilayat Khorasan, the Taliban wrote a letter to the IS chief, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The Taliban’s demand was that the IS should stop recruiting jihadists in Afghanistan. Both the Taliban and the Islamic State were insurgencies that time.

The letter, signed by the then political committee chief of the Taliban, Mullah Akhtar Mansour said there was room for “only one flag and one leadership” in the fight to re-establish Islamic rule in Afghanistan. Mullah Mansour would later become Taliban’s leader and be killed by a U.S. air strike in May 2016.

The Islamic State faction, which came to be known as the Islamic State-Khorasan, did not stop recruiting disgruntled Taliban fighters. Nor did it stop launching terror attacks across Afghanistan. Today, the Taliban are no longer an insurgency. They are the government in Kabul. And the IS-Khorasan has emerged as the most powerful branch of the Islamic State networks. It has training centres in the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. It has recruited thousands of disgruntled Central Asians. It has carried out a number of attacks in recent months, including the January twin bombings in Kerman, Iran, a strike on a church in Istanbul and a massive attack on a concert hall in the outskirts of Moscow on March 22.

Armed gunmen opened fire at the Crocus City Concert Hall and threw explosives, killing at least 137 people and wounding nearly 200 others, in one of the worst terrorist attacks in Russia in years. Russian authorities have arrested and charged four Tajik nationals for the attack.

When the Islamic State announced the formation of the Khorasan Wilayat in January 2015, referring to an geographical area encompassing Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia, the group’s immediate strategy was to exploit the divisions within the main jihadist groups operating in the region. It appointed Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) commander Hafiz Saeed Khan as its leader and former Afghan Taliban commander Abdul Rauf Aliza as his deputy (both were killed in U.S. strikes). It attracted members from different militant organisations such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the Haqqani Network and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan into its fold.

The IS-K declared its allegiance to Abu Bakr Baghdadi, the self-declared Khalifa, who was killed by an American strike in 2019. In operational tactics and ideology, it followed its parental organisation. The key goal is to establish “Islamic rule” in the “province” and for that they are ready to wage “jihad”. In a video message released in in 2015. the IS-Khorasan stated: “There is no doubt that Allah the Almighty has blessed us with jihad in the land of Khorasan since a long time ago, and it is from the grace of Allah that we fought any disbeliever who entered the land of Khorasan. All of this is for the sake of establishing the Shariah.”

When the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria came under pressure in 2015 and 2016, the core organisation shifted its focus to Afghanistan. The IS was losing territories to Kurdish militias in Syria and government forces and Shia militias in Iraq. In Afghanistan, a fractured country batted by civil war, the IS saw an opportunity to rebuild its organisation. Having built its base in eastern Afghanistan, the IS-Khorasan issued propaganda messages, calling on Muslim youth across Asia to join the group. Many radicalised youth, including dozens from India, travelled to Afghanistan to either join the IS or live an “Islamic life” under the Caliphate’s rule.

But this upset the Taliban, which did not want its monopoly of violent jihad to be challenged. The Taliban are a tribal, nationalist militant force, backed by Pakistan, whereas the IS-Khorasan doesn’t believe in national borders — they are global jiahdists fighting for a transnational Islamist Caliphate.

The ideological and operational differences led to open clashes between the IS- Khorasan and the Taliban. When the Taliban seized Kabul and took over prisons in August 2021, they freed several of their members, but executed IS-Khorasan militants and leaders. Currently, Shahab al-Muhajir is the Emir” of the group.

Why Russia?

The U.S. has carried out a number of targeted attacks, killing several of the IS-Khorasan leaders. In April 2017, then President Donald Trump ordered troops to drop the ‘Mother of all Bombs’, the most powerful non-nuclear bomb, on IS caves in eastern Afghanistan. But despite the U.S.’s targeted bombings and the Taliban’s counter-attacks on the ground, the IS-Khorasan has continued to expand its operations. When the Taliban established its regime in Kabul, the IS-Khorasan proclaimed that it is the real jihadist outfit. Militants from Central Asia who were part of the Islamic State Caliphate swelled the IS-Khorasan’s ranks after they relocated to Afghanistan.

The IS-Khorasan also launched propaganda videos targeting Afghanistan’s ethnic minorities such as Tajiks and Uzbeks, who were excluded by the Taliban’s Pashtun-only regime. Russia, its President Vladimir Putin and Iran emerged as the key enemies in the IS’s propaganda videos. After the Moscow attack, the IS said its soldiers had killed a “lot of Christians”. It also said Russia had “blood of Muslims on its hands”, referring to its military operations in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Syria.

Why does the IS hate Russia and Iran?

The answer lies in Syria.

The IS was founded in in Syria in 2014 amid the country’s civil war. It had grand ambitions, which were thwarted by Russia’s 2015 intervention. The IS captured eastern Syrian cities of Raqqa and Der Ezzour in 2013 and 2014, and it wanted to topple the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and capture Damascus, the seat of power of the Umayyad Caliphate in the seventh century.

But Russia’s intervention, along with help from Iran, which is a Shia majority republic, made sure that President Assad survived the civil war. In 2017, when the IS captured the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, Russians fought along with the Syrian troops to liberate the city. Subsequently, the IS’s physical Caliphate was crushed by a host of forces — Kurds, Iraqis, Syrians and Iran-trained Shia militias with air cover from Russia and the U.S. Now, the IS-Khorasan sees ‘Christian’ Russia and ‘Rejectionist’ Iran (in the IS lexicon, Shias are “rejectionists”, who rejects the first three Caliphs of Sunni Islam) as top enemies.

Today, the IS-Khorasan wants to be the centre of global jihadism. Back-to-back attacks in different places from Istanbul to Kerman to Moscow suggest that the group is on a path to revival, six years after its physical Caliphate was destroyed. Chaos in West Asia, a base in Afghanistan, and foot soldiers from Central Asia are all helping the group expand its activities, with a highly sophisticated internet propaganda.

Reporting: Stanly Johny

Production: Shibu Narayan and Shikha Kumari

In June 2015, a few months after the Islamic State (IS) announced the establishment of its Wilayat Khorasan (Khorasan Province), the Taliban wrote a letter to the then IS chief, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, asking him to stop recruiting jihadists in Afghanistan. The letter, signed by the then political committee chief of the Taliban, Mullah Akhtar Mansour (who would take over the insurgency in a month and be killed by a U.S. air strike in May 2016), said there was room for “only one flag and one leadership” in the fight to re-establish Islamic rule in Afghanistan. But the IS faction, which came to be known as the Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K), did not stop recruiting disgruntled Taliban fighters. In the subsequent years, the IS-K attacked the Taliban for holding talks with the “crusaders” (read the U.S.) and abandoning jihad. It launched a series of attacks, mainly targeting Afghanistan’s Shia-Hazara minority.       

ALSO READ | The View From India | Why did the Islamic State attack Russia?

Today, the IS-K has emerged as the most powerful and most ambitious branch of the Islamic State networks. It has training centres in the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. It has recruited thousands of disgruntled Central Asians. It has stepped up attacks in recent months across the Eurasian landmass, including the January twin bombings of Kerman, Iran, a strike on a church in Istanbul in the same month and a massive attack on a concert hall in the outskirts of Moscow on March 22. Armed gunmen opened fire at the Crocus City Concert Hall and threw explosives, killing at least 137 people and wounding nearly 200 others, in one of the worst terrorist attacks in Russia in years. Russian authorities have arrested and charged four Tajik nationals for the attack.  

The origins 

When the Islamic State announced the formation of the Khorasan Province, referring to an area encompassing Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia, in January 2015, the group’s immediate strategy was to exploit the divisions within the main jihadist groups operating in the region. It appointed Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) commander Hafiz Saeed Khan as its leader and former Afghan Taliban commander Abdul Rauf Aliza as his deputy (both were killed in U.S. strikes). It attracted members from different militant organisations such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the Haqqani Network and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan into its fold, according to the U.S.-based Combating Terrorism Centre.

The IS-K declared its allegiance to Baghdadi. In operational tactics and ideology, it followed its parental organisation. The key goal is to establish “Islamic rule” in the “province” and for that they are ready to wage “jihad”. “There is no doubt that Allah the Almighty has blessed us with jihad in the land of Khorasan since a long time ago, and it is from the grace of Allah that we fought any disbeliever who entered the land of Khorasan. All of this is for the sake of establishing the Shariah,” the IS-K said in a video message in 2015.

ALSO READ | Terror in Moscow: On concerns over the Islamic State

When the IS in Iraq and Syria came under pressure in 2015 and 2016, the core organisation shifted its focus to Afghanistan. The IS was losing territories to Kurdish militias in Syria and government forces and Shia militias in Iraq. In Afghanistan, a divided country with the government’s writ hardly reaching its hinterlands, the IS saw an opportunity to rebuild its organisation. Having built its base in eastern Afghanistan, the IS-K issued propaganda messages, calling on Muslim youth across Asia to join the group. Many radicalised youth, including dozens from India, travelled to Afghanistan to either join the IS or live an “Islamic life” under the Caliphate’s rule.

Rivalry with Taliban

The Taliban did not like its monopoly over violent jihad being challenged by another organisation. Also, the Taliban are a tribal, nationalist militant force, backed by Pakistan, whereas the IS-K doesn’t believe in national borders—they are global jihadists fighting for a transnational Islamist Caliphate.

“The leadership of Daesh [IS] is independent, the goals of Daesh are independent,” Omar Khorasani, who was the IS-K’s top leader, said in an interview in 2021. “We have a global agenda and so when people ask who can really represent Islam and the whole Islamic community, of course, we’re more attractive.” The ideological and operational differences led to open clashes between the IS-K and the Taliban. When the Taliban seized Kabul and took over prisons in August 2021, they freed several of their members, but executed Khorasani and other IS-K militants. Shahab al-Muhajir has been leading the terrorist group as its “Emir” since Khorasani was arrested in April 2020.

Why Russia and Iran?

The U.S. has carried out a number of targeted attacks, killing several of the ISKP’s leaders. In April 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump ordered troops to drop the ‘Mother of all Bombs’, the most powerful non-nuclear bomb, on IS caves in eastern Afghanistan. But despite the U.S.’s targeted bombings and the Taliban’s counter-attacks on the ground, the IS-K has continued to expand its operations. When the Taliban established its regime in Kabul, the IS-K proclaimed that it is the real jihadist outfit. Militants from Central Asia who were part of the Islamic State Caliphate swelled the IS-K’s ranks after they relocated to Afghanistan.

The IS-K also launched propaganda videos targeting Afghanistan’s ethnic minorities such as Tajiks and Uzbeks, who were excluded by the Taliban’s Pashtun-only regime. Russia and its President Vladimir Putin emerged as the key enemy in the IS’s propaganda videos. After the Moscow attack, the IS said its soldiers had killed a “lot of Christians”. It also said Russia had “blood of Muslims on its hands”, referring to its military operations in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Syria.

Particularly in Syria, where IS was founded in 2014 amid the country’s civil war, it had grand ambitions, which were thwarted by Russia’s 2015 intervention. The IS captured eastern Syrian cities of Raqqa and Der Ezzour in 2013 and 2024, and it wanted to topple the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and capture Damascus, the seat of power of the Umayyad Caliphate in the seventh century. But Russia’s intervention, along with help from Iran, made sure that President Assad survived the civil war.

In 2017, when the IS captured the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, Russians fought along with the Syrian troops to liberate the city. Subsequently, the IS’s physical Caliphate was crushed by a host of forces — Kurds, Iraqis, Syrians and Shia militias with air cover from Russia and the U.S. Now, the IS-K sees ‘Christian’ Russia and ‘Rejectionist’ Iran (in the IS lexicon, Shias are “rejectionists”, who reject the first three Caliphs of Sunni Islam) as top enemies.

Today, the IS-K wants to be the centre of global jihadism. Back-to-back attacks in different places from Istanbul to Kerman to Moscow suggest that the group is on a path to revival, six years after its physical Caliphate was destroyed. Chaos in West Asia, a base in Afghanistan, and foot soldiers from Central Asia are all helping the group expand its activities, with highly sophisticated internet propaganda.

Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge. File
| Photo Credit: The Hindu

The Congress on March 23 condemned the “dastardly” terror attack in Moscow and said “we strongly stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of Russia”.

“Assailants burst into a large concert hall in Moscow on March 22 and sprayed the crowd with gunfire, killing more than 60 people, injuring more than 100 and setting fire to the venue in a brazen attack,” according to media reports.

Also read | India stands in solidarity with Russia in this hour of grief, says PM Modi on Moscow terror attack

In a post on X, Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge said, “The Indian National Congress strongly condemns the “dastardly” terrorist attack on innocent people in Moscow. Terrorism is the biggest threat to humanity and peace. Our heart goes out to the families of the victims and in this hour of sorrow, we strongly stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of Russia and the Russian Federation,” he said.

Media reports said the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement posted on its affiliated channels on social media.

A police officer inspects a deadbody after the shooting attack, outside the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, France, Friday, in 2015.
| Photo Credit: AP

On March 11, Spain marks 20 years since Europe’s worst Islamist attack when militants claiming to be acting on behalf of Al-Qaeda bombed commuter trains in Madrid, killing 192 people and wounding nearly 2,000 others. The perpetrators said the attack was revenge for Spain’s role in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

A decade later, jihadists invoked the West’s intervention against the Islamic State (IS) group in Iraq and Syria to unleash a new wave of terror in Europe. A look back at the deadliest attacks over the past two decades:

2005 London bombings

A year after Spain, London’s transport system was targeted on July 7 when four suicide bombers blow themselves up in coordinated strikes on the underground network and a bus. Claimed by Al-Qaeda, the attacks killed 52 people and injure another 700.

2015: Bataclan, Paris

A decade later in France, a new wave of jihadist attacks began, most of which were claimed by the IS. The deadliest took place in Paris on November 13 when IS gunmen went on a shooting and bombing rampage, killing 130 people at the Bataclan concert hall, in bars and restaurants, and at the Stade de France stadium in France’s worst post-war attacks.

2016: Brussels airport and metro

On March 22, IS suicide bombers killed 35 people and injured another 340 at Brussels airport and the Maelbeek metro station, near the European Union headquarters.

Belgian investigators said the assailants were part of the same Brussels-based cell that orchestrated the Paris attacks.

2016: Nice attacks

France was again targeted on July 14, Bastille Day, when a radicalised Tunisian drove a truck through the crowds after a fireworks display in the southern resort of Nice, killing 86 people and injuring more than 400.

The attacker was shot dead by police with IS claiming responsibility for the attack. French investigators did not find any links between the assailant and IS.

2017: Manchester pop concert

Back in Britain, a young Briton of Libyan origin blowed himself up at an Ariana Grande pop concert in the city of Manchester on May 22. The attack killed 22 people including seven children and left around 100 injured.

The bombing was claimed by IS, with the 22-year-old assailant using a homemade shrapnel bomb. His family had fought in Libya’s civil wars.

2017: Barcelona’s Ramblas

On August 17, a group of young radicalised Moroccans and Spaniards of Moroccan origin ploughed a van into pedestrians in Barcelona’s famous Ramblas boulevard.

Later, in the early hours of August 18, five others drove a car into pedestrians in Cambrils, a seaside town 100 km (60 miles) further south.

The two attacks, which left 16 people dead and 140 wounded, were claimed by IS and carried out by a cell comprising mostly youngsters who grew up in Catalonia.