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.

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.

Members of the Russian Emergencies Ministry clear rubble at the Crocus City Hall concert venue after a shooting attack and fire, outside Moscow, Russia. File
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Moscow’s Basmanny district court on Sunday charged two suspects in Friday’s concert hall attack in which at least 137 people were killed with an act of terrorism, Russian state news agency TASS reported.

The court listed the suspects as Dalerdzhon Barotovich Mirzoyev and Saidakrami Murodali Rachabalizoda.

The suspects may face life in prison, RIA news agency reported.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. File
| Photo Credit: AFP

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Saturday accused Russia’s Vladimir Putin of seeking to “shift the blame” onto Kyiv for the Moscow concert hall attack that killed 133 people.

“What happened yesterday in Moscow is obvious: Mr. Putin and the other scum are just trying to blame it on someone else,” Mr. Zelensky announced, after Mr. Putin said the suspects had been fleeing towards Ukraine.

“They always have the same methods,” Mr. Zelensky added.

In a televised address earlier Saturday, President Putin said the four gunmen arrested for the deadly attack were “travelling towards Ukraine, where, according to preliminary data, a window was prepared for them on the Ukrainian side to cross the state border”.

Kyiv has angrily dismissed the claims by the Russian leader, which come more than two years after Moscow invaded Ukraine.

“That low-life Putin, instead of dealing with his Russian citizens, addressing them, was silent for a day, thinking about how to bring it to Ukraine,” Mr. Zelensky said.

“Everything is absolutely predictable.”

The Moscow attack has been claimed by the Islamic State group (IS).

It was the deadliest attack in Russia for almost two decades and the deadliest in Europe to have been claimed by IS.

Putin made no reference to the group’s claims of responsibility in his address.

People lay flowers and lit candles in memory of the Moscow concert gun attack victims in the center of Simferopol, Crimea, on March 22, 2024. Gunmen opened fire at a Moscow concert hall on March 22, 2024 killing at least 40 people, wounding more than 100 and sparking an inferno, authorities said, with the Islamic State group claiming responsibility.
| Photo Credit: AFP

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for an attack on Moscow concert hall that killed several people 

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for a gun attack on a Moscow concert hall on March 22, which Russian authorities said killed several people. IS fighters “attacked a large gathering… on the outskirts of the Russian capital Moscow”, the group said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app. Russia’s Federal Security Service said 40 people died and more than 100 were wounded in the attack.

Maldives President Mohamed Muizzu seeks debt relief from India amid tensions

After his anti-India rhetoric, Maldives President Mohamed Muizzu has struck a reconciliatory tone, saying India will continue to remain his country’s “closest ally” and urged New Delhi to provide debt relief to the archipelago nation.

Arvind Kejriwal sent to ED custody till March 28

A court on March 22 remanded Delhi Chief Minister and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) national convener Arvind Kejriwal in Enforcement Directorate (ED) custody till March 28, a day after the Central agency arrested him in connection with an excise policy-linked money laundering case. Special Judge (Prevention of Corruption Act) Kaveri Baweja of the Rouse Avenue Courts asked for Mr. Kejriwal to be produced before her on March 28 at 2 p.m. The six-day remand came on an ED plea seeking his 10-day custody in the case.

INDIA bloc leaders reach out to EC, highlight ‘misuse’ of Central agencies

A day after the arrest of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) convener and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal by the Enforcement Directorate in the excise policy case, a delegation of INDIA bloc leaders on March 22 called on the Election Commission (EC) to allege “unrelenting, blatant and illegal deployment of Central Agencies” by the ruling BJP to target the Opposition parties. The delegation presented a memorandum in which the INDIA bloc leaders submitted a list of 10 instances of agencies going after the Opposition parties since January and the absence of a level playing field in the elections.

Delhi High Court rejects Congress’s plea against tax reassessment

In a huge setback to the Congress ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, the Delhi High Court on March 22 rejected its pleas challenging the reassessment proceedings initiated against it by the Income Tax department. The court said the I-T department “appears to have collated substantial and concrete evidence warranting further scrutiny and examination”.

AAP workers hit streets; police ramp up security; traffic goes into a tailspin

Central Delhi turned into a fortress as Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) workers reached Deen Dayal Upadhyay (DDU) Marg on Friday to protest against the arrest of their party chief and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.

Stalin launches campaign with scathing attack on PM Modi over electoral bonds, corruption

Chief Minister and DMK president M.K. Stalin hit the campaign trail for the Lok Sabha election on Friday with a blistering attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He said that the electoral bonds scheme had turned out to be a “Himalayan scam” that had brought shame to the country.

Lalu Prasad shortlists candidates, may field daughter Rohini from Saran Lok Sabha seat

The Mahagathbandhan (grand alliance) led by the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) in Bihar is abuzz with talks that party chief Lalu Prasad is likely to field two of his daughters in the Lok Sabha election. Mr. Prasad could field eldest daughter Misa Bharti from Patliputra seat again and second daughter Rohini Acharya from Saran, said party sources.

Arrest of Kejriwal will only positively impact the INDIA bloc, says VCK chief Thirumavalavan

Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK) president Thol. Thirumavalavan on Friday condemned the arrest of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in the Delhi excise policy case but said it will only galvanise the Opposition Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) in the upcoming Lok Sabha election.

Result of his own actions: Anna Hazare on Kejriwal’s arrest

Social activist Anna Hazare on March 22 said that he had cautioned Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, currently arrested in the excise policy case, to refrain from involvement in such policy matters. Mr. Hazare, a key figure in the Lokpal movement alongside Mr. Kejriwal in the early 2010s, stated that the Delhi Chief Minister’s arrest by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) was a consequence of his own actions.

OBC leaders extend unconditional support for Congress

An umbrella organisation of backward classes outfits, representing the interest of other backward classes (OBC), called on Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge on Friday and announced its “unconditional support” to the INDIA bloc. Former Congress chief Rahul Gandhi was also present at the meeting that took place in Mr. Kharge’s official residence.

Rights groups seek return of land taken away in Sandeshkhali

A collective of four civil rights organisations on Friday released a fact finding report on Sandeshkhali violence and demanded that the lands which have been forcibly taken from the villagers be returned and made cultivable at the expense of the State government. Sandeshkhali, a block in Sundarban and under the administrative control of North 24 Parganas district was on the boil over past several weeks over allegations of sexual assault.

Post surprise inspection, CBSE cancels affiliations of 20 schools citing malpractices

The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has cancelled the affiliation of 20 schools across India on Friday, after it was revealed that these schools were involved in malpractices. The malpractices included presenting dummy students, ineligible candidates and not maintaining records properly, said Secretary, CBSE, Himanshu Gupta.

Arvind Kejriwal entitled to fair and impartial trial, says German Foreign Ministry

Germany on Friday became the first major global power to remind that Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal who was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate on Thursday has the right to a “fair and impartial trial.”

YouTuber Elvish Yadav gets bail in drugs case, to be taken to Gurugram from Noida jail today

A Gautam Buddh Nagar court granted bail to controversial YouTuber Siddharth Yadav alias Elvish Yadav in a drugs case on March 22, six days after he was lodged in a jail in Noida, his lawyers said. The jail authorities said they have received Mr. Yadav’s release order but he would be handed over on March 23 to the custody of a court in Haryana’s Gurugram, where he is to be produced in an assault case involving content creator Sagar Thakur alias Maxtern.

With Bhutan’s Gelephu project in mind, India to double assistance to ₹10,000 crore for next 5 years

India has decided to double Bhutan’s assistance over the next five years, from ₹5,000 crore in 2019-2024 to ₹10,000 crore for the period till 2029, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced in Thimphu on March 22. Mr. Modi made the announcement after he was awarded Bhutan’s highest honour, the ‘Order of the Druk Gyalpo’, which was announced in 2021, to acknowledge India’s role in ensuring “Bhutan’s success in managing the COVID-19 pandemic”.

Princess of Wales Kate Middleton says she is having chemotherapy after cancer discovery

Britain’s Princess of Wales Catherine “Kate” Middleton, said on March 22 she was undergoing preventative chemotherapy after tests taken following major abdominal surgery in January revealed cancer had been present. Princess Kate, 42, the wife of heir-to-the-throne Prince William, spent two weeks in hospital in January after having what her office said at the time was a successful, planned surgery for a non-cancerous but unspecified condition.

Simon Harris set to be Ireland’s youngest PM

Simon Harris, set to become Ireland’s youngest ever taoiseach (Prime Minister), will hope his social media skills and fresh face can save his party’s flagging fortunes as elections loom. Already dubbed by media the “TikTok Taoiseach” (pronounced “Tee-shock”), the 37-year-old beats the previous record holder, predecessor Leo Varadkar, who was 38 when he took the top job in 2017.

Russia and China veto U.S. resolution in UNSC calling for immediate ceasefire in Gaza

Russia and China on March 22 vetoed a U.S.-sponsored U.N. resolution calling for “an immediate and sustained cease-fire” in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza to protect civilians and enable humanitarian aid to be delivered to more than 2 million hungry Palestinians. The vote in the 15-member Security Council was 11 members in favor, three against and one abstention.

IPL-17; CSK vs RCB | Mustafizur and batters fashion CSK’s winning start

Ruturaj Gaikwad couldn’t have asked for a better start as captain of Chennai Super Kings as his side began its title defence in style with a comfortable six-wicket win over Royal Challengers Bengaluru in the opening game of IPL-17 at MAC Stadium on March 17. Chasing 174, CSK powered through to the target, riding on a series of cameos from its batters. Opener Rachin Ravindra set the ball rolling by blasting a quickfire 37 (15b, 3×4, 3×6) before Ajinkya Rahane, Daryl Mitchell, Shivam Dube, and Ravindra Jadeja chipped in with valuable contributions.

New Delhi:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi today said that India strongly condemns the terror attack in Moscow and stands in solidarity with the government and the people of Russia in this hour of grief.

Terrorists attacked a large concert hall in Moscow yesterday and sprayed the crowd with gunfire, killing more than 60 people, injuring over 100 and setting fire to the venue in a brazen attack.

“We strongly condemn the heinous terrorist attack in Moscow. Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the victims,” PM Modi said in a post on X.

We strongly condemn the heinous terrorist attack in Moscow. Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the victims. India stands in solidarity with the government and the people of the Russian Federation in this hour of grief.

— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) March 23, 2024

“India stands in solidarity with the government and the people of the Russian Federation in this hour of grief,” 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.

More than 60 people were killed and about 115 others injured after gunmen opened fire at them in a Moscow concert hall, Russian authorities said, raising an earlier count of 40.

Here are the top 10 updates on this big story