How does Islamic State threaten the post-Soviet space?

After the execution of 21 Egyptian Christians by militants of Islamic State, Egyptian battle-planes bombed arms dumps and command centers of the extremists in the Libyan city of Derna. This made experts discuss the opening of a new front against terrorism. However, the director of the Caspian Cooperation Institute, political analyst Sergei Mikheyev, thinks that there is a threat of penetration of IS terrorists into Russian territory and into the countries of Central Asia and the South Caucasus.

First of all, they recruit supporters here, and secondly, there is a direct military threat to the creation of terrorist organizations, throwing in militants to destabilize a local situation. The expert says that the factor of Afghanistan should be taken into account, where there will be at least a reduced contingent of NATO: “It is not a secret that ISIS and Afghan radicals have close ties. I do not exclude the possibility that out of Afghanistan any armed provocations can be committed in Central Asia just within the frame of the activities of international terrorism,” Mikheyev says.

In light of the reality of this threat to the countries of the South Caucasus and Central Asia, there seems to the expert to be an extremely topical cooperation in the field of security: “For all of us, it is extremely important in this context to cooperate in the sphere of security, because with this threat, standing alone in the scale of the Central Asian states and the South Caucasus, it will be extremely difficult to manage. At the same time, hopes for a Western coalition have no practical meaning.”

Mikheyev believes that appearance of ISIS is connected with the mistakes and activities of the Americans in Iraq and Syria: “There was not a collapse of the nation-state in Iraq, there wasn’t a civil war in Syria - and there was no ISIS. Therefore, for the post-Soviet states, hope that the Americans and their allies will solve all these problems is absolutely empty, hope for this does not make sense.”

The expert stresses that even though there are fighters from Russia and the CIS in ISIS, nevertheless, “we cannot say that the idea of ISIS finds any great support among the population of Russian Muslims. For the vast majority of sensible people, regardless of whether they are Muslims or Christians, the nature of Islamic State is quite clear. This is Satanism, when people in the name of God justify absolute brutality and lawlessness… The motives of their activities in this case are secondary and the results are primary, but the results in this case are absolutely devastating, in the first place for the national states in the region. ISIS is an internationalist organization without connotations, positive or negative. Its internationalism is expressed in the following: ISIS deliberately destroys the national states in the region, they believe that nation-states should not exist, that they should be destroyed, and all must be installed in such a quasi-religious obscurantist political regime, which is nothing but destruction itself, it is not able to create, only destroy.”

Speaking about the attractiveness of their ideology, Mikheyev said that it is a radically simple answer to all the questions: “If you do not like something, then it can be solved by killing someone who you do not like. There are always a great number of proponents of these views in all countries. I think that people who are willing to accept such an issue, more than if they are paid for this, are numerous not only in the CIS countries, but also in Europe.”

The expert notes that “European countries are the most prosperous regions of the world, where seemingly it is as if they declare a solution, so to speak, to ethnic, confessional problems, although we see who appears in the video frames of this terrible footage. There, people appear who are not even necessarily ethnic Muslims. There are a huge number of immigrants from Western Europe. I do not rule out that if you calculate, it turns out that in Western Europe there are even more such people than in the post-Soviet states.”