Since the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, American authorities have warned of the Islamic State Khorasan Province’s (ISIS-K) desire to launch external strikes and their potential ability to target the US within six months. However, after the terrorist organization took credit for the March 22 music hall bombing that killed 143 lives, neither Russian President Vladimir Putin nor Director of the Federal Security Service (FSB), Alexander Bortnikov, mentioned the Islamic State.

Initial Attempts at collaboration

Both, however, attributed the incident’s cause to “radical Islamists,” with Bortnikov going on to say that it was “of course aided by Western services,” blaming the US, Great Britain, and Ukraine for their role in enabling the attack. The three main intelligence leaders from Russia were invited to CIA headquarters by the-CIA Director Mike Pompeo to have meetings on counterterrorism. Bortnikov, then-Chief of Russian Military Intelligence (GRU) Igor Korobov, and Sergey Naryshkin, director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR, took part. Within the agency, however, we recognized that Pompeo’s goal was to placate the former president, who had rejected the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russian meddling had meddled in the 2016 election. The director made it his mission to win over Trump by spending nearly every morning in the White House.

Challenges and obstacles

ISIS-K was within my purview as the CIA’s top counterterrorism officer for South and Southwest Asia at the time. After the discussions in Washington, Pompeo directed my office to deploy a group of specialists with experience in the Islamic State to Moscow to start the first of what the director anticipated would be an ongoing conversation. Pompeo reasoned that the Russians would be willing to assist in combating the threat posed by Central Asian ISIS members returning home from Syria and Iraq with newly acquired skills, battlefield experience, and extensive jihadist networks, in response to shared concerns about the Islamic State’s external capabilities. 

I was not allowed by the CIA to discuss directly the actions or information that our Russian informants supplied. However, I can state that it was comparable to, if not worse than, how a number of former coworkers characterized Trump’s plan when they said that “the effort to foster (counterterrorism) cooperation proved a failure” in a 2020 Washington Post opinion article. There was never any significant intelligence or information from the Russian side.

Operational complications

However, misinformation regarding ISIS has been created and disseminated by the Russians. To put it simply, former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul said that the idea that the US formed the Islamic State under former President Barack Obama had been spread by Russian state-controlled media and bloggers. Trump is infamous for repeating in public the same lies spoken by Iranian and Russian leaders. Despite its denial and spin to protect Putin’s reputation, Russia is aware that it has a terrorism issue, but his interests are elsewhere. There is no existential challenge to Putin’s authority from terrorism. Because of his war on Ukraine, a wave of long-repressed fear, rage, and desire for change may have reached a critical mass, which might lead to a popular revolt that overwhelms his security forces and pose a challenge to the government.

Geopolitical dynamics

Additionally, Putin has a tendency to project his own actions onto others and believes some of his own statements. Putin expressed gratitude to Trump and the CIA for the crucial information sharing that the US provided in late 2017, enabling Russia to avert a planned Islamic State assault in the Russian city of St. Petersburg. Due in large part to its possession of reliable, if incomplete, information, the US Embassy in Moscow said publicly on March 7 that there was an “imminent” terrorist danger in Russia. 

Although the US had informed Russia of this information prior to the official announcement, Putin felt he was being set up for humiliation and failure because he claimed the US was purposefully withholding information about the threat and giving Russia little time to respond to the warning. Despite having the same opponent, the US and Russia do not have the same situation, mindset, or resources. The Islamic State is in a better position to plan more intricate operations, such as the group of gunmen who stormed the Moscow performance and set the venue on fire, throughout Russia and Central Asia.

Conclusion

In conclusion, ISIS is more likely to incite lone wolf strikes that target US targets overseas before turning its attention to the US homeland. Furthermore, any assault by the US would have more dire political repercussions for the country than for Putin, who stands to win politically.