Salafi-jihadi military associations, particularly Islamic State and al-Qaeda, are evolving as a substantial threat to the security of the World. The organizations also pose an existential danger to world order, facilitating domestic and global trends that threaten Western values more broadly. Islamic State and al-Qaeda themselves are more than just tactical terrorist gatherings; they are insurgencies. As rebels, they seek first to overthrow all existing regimes in the Muslim world and substitute them with their own, and later, to strike the West from a position of power to extend their ideologies more widely. These parties now want to take the war into the West to achieve their grand strategic purpose of establishing a global caliphate.

Approaches to counter groups such as Islamic State and al-Qaeda will thus require a multi-faceted coalition procedure. Western superpowers must conduct the opposition and ensure the continuance of existing guarantors of international security such as NATO to counter this mounting terror threat from these parties. The threat appears especially evident in Russia. In March of this year, several gunmen unlocked fire at a rock concert in Moscow, killing over 130 people. An Islamic State branch understood as ISIS-K claimed responsibility for the attack. 

After years of caution that the Islamic State was rebuilding power and resolve to resume an international terrorist movement, the Moscow attack showed that the danger is now imminent and substantial. In recent years, the extensive majority of successful ISIS-K attacks have been in Afghanistan, with many targeting the minority Shia Muslim Hazara community. But it is becoming clear that if ISIS-K is indeed responsible for the Moscow episode, we should prepare for further endeavoured attacks – not just in Russia but across Europe and the rest of the West.

The Islamic State in broad, and ISIS-K in particular, have long declared their intention of striking Russia, in particular. This may reasonably be due to Russia’s earlier military occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s and its long record of restrictions on Russian Muslim communities, especially in the North Caucasus.

Tellingly, many of the ISIS-K militants captured across Europe, including in Russia, over the past two years have also been Russian citizens and people from Central Asia with ties to Russia. Russia also delivers a lifeline to the brutal government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

The episode in Moscow is a clear reminder we must not forget the growing terror risk in Afghanistan and the danger these groups pose to the West. In June this year, al-Qaeda’s leader in Afghanistan, Saif al-Adl, administered a call to foreign fighters around the world to relocate to Afghanistan and enter the ranks of the jihadi terror group. This belatedly call from Adl shows that al-Qaeda is certainly looking beyond Afghanistan’s borders with aims to target the West.

The particular that al-Qaeda is championing Afghanistan as fertile ground to prepare for terrorist attacks on the West over 20 years after 9/11 is no wonder. There are no easy answers, but shifting away will only make the situation more alarming.