As Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, pledged this week to bolster his country’s nuclear arsenal to counter the Nato build-up in Europe, the Kremlin’s intelligence chief was warning of another perceived security threat emanating from predominantly Muslim former Soviet central Asia.
“I want to draw immediate attention to the widening zone of influence of international terrorism,” Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the Russian Federal Security Services, the successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB, said on Wednesday.
“Islamic State is creating cells in various regions of the world and has openly declared its intention to destabilise the Commonwealth of Independent States” – a group of former Soviet republics – “and central Asia,” he told a meeting of the CIS anti-terrorist centre in Moscow.
Reliable data is difficult to obtain, but several thousand central Asians are believed to have fled poverty and oppression in their homelands to join Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Russia has also become a fertile recruiting ground for radical Islamist groups that prey on Muslims from the troubled north Caucasus and central Asian migrant workers.
Russia sees the five former Soviet states of central Asia – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan – as part of its special-interest zone and has been growing increasingly apprehensive about the prospects for regional security as the United States military moves to withdraw from Afghanistan after a decade of war.
Islamic State has recently spread its tentacles into the ranks of Taliban militants in Afghanistan, stoking fears of a broader confrontation that could bring chaos to neighbouring central Asia.
An Islamic State advance into Afghanistan and Pakistan could destabilise the entire region and unleash a wave of refugees into central Asia, says Alexander Golts, an independent Russian military expert.
“It hasn’t happened yet, and it won’t happen in the next year or 18 months. But the threat exists, and it seriously concerns Russia,” he says.
Weak link
Russia, which supported the government of Tajikistan in a violent civil war against Islamists in the 1990s, still sees the impoverished country, with its long, porous border with Afghanistan, as the weak link in central Asian security.
As the US pulls troops out of Afghanistan, Russia has been beefing up its presence at a large Soviet-era military base it still maintains in Tajikistan and training local servicemen.
Concerted action by Russian and Tajik forces is required to bolster security in central Asia, Sergei Shoigu, the Russian defence minister, said after talks with Emomali Rahmon, the Tajik president, in Dushanbe early this month.
“In the context of the international coalition’s withdrawal from Afghanistan our armed forces must be prepared for any turn of events, including the most unfavourable one,” he said.
Shoigu arrived in Dushanbe as Tajik prosecutors put out an international warrant for the arrest of one of the country’s top law enforcers who, after mysteriously disappearing in April, had surfaced in an Islamic State propaganda video supposedly shot in Syria.
Clad in a black Islamic State uniform and flanked by gunmen, Col Gulmurod Khalimov, the head of Tajikistan’s special-assignment police unit, denounced President Rahmon for quashing religious freedoms and pledged to return with an army of jihadists to establish Sharia law in his country.
Drawing Russia into the Islamist equation, Khalimov castigated Tajik migrant workers for “becoming the slaves of infidels” and urged his fellow countrymen, wherever they were, to join the international battle to establish a caliphate.
Western commentators have frequently accused authoritarian central Asian leaders of exaggerating the threat of Islamist extremism to justify persecution of political opponents and distract public attention from the more pressing problems of corruption, poor governance and the huge gap between the rich and the poor.
Ideological appeal
But the surprise defection of the high-ranking Col Khalimov is a worrying development, demonstrating Islamic State’s ideological appeal not just to the downtrodden Muslim population but also to the heart of the privileged elite.
Tough restrictions on the practice even of moderate Islam have become one of the key elements of destabilisation in Tajikistan and the whole central Asian region, says Vitaly Ponomarev, director of the central Asian programme at the Memorial Human Rights Centre in Moscow. “It will come back to haunt the authorities,” he says.
International rights groups have accused the West of turning a blind eye to the deteriorating human-rights landscape in central Asia in the interest of maintaining good ties in the resource-rich region. Highlighting growing concern about security risks in the region, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, warned last week that human-rights violations were often a harbinger of much worse to come.
Curbing freedoms might create “an illusion of stability in the short run” but ultimately would foster “a breeding ground for extremist ideologies”, he said during a five-day visit to central Asia.
