Submitted testimony for a UK Parliament Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on policy towards Central Asia. Chose to focus on China, and draws on impressions from a lot of recent regional travel in particular.
Raffaello Pantucci is a Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) in Singapore and a Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London. He is the co-author of Sinostan: China’s Inadvertent Empire (Oxford University Press, April 2022) which draws on over a decade’s research and travel around Eurasia including repeated visits to all five of the Central Asian countries, Xinjiang, wider China, Afghanistan, Russia, Iran and Pakistan.
A good starting point for contemporary China’s relations with Central Asia is 1994 when then-Premier Li Peng visited the region stopping at all of the capitals except for Dushanbe which was at the time suffering from a brutal civil war. During the visit, he highlighted two key themes – building new ‘silk roads’ to encourage trade and connectivity, while on the other hand worrying about separatist and terrorist groups that China saw as gathering in the region to threaten Beijing.
In 2001, China joined hands with all of the Central Asian countries except Turkmenistan to create the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Building on the success of the Shanghai Five grouping – which sought to delineate and stabilize the new border regions that China had inherited following the collapse of the Soviet Union (with Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan) – the SCO expanded to bring in Uzbekistan. Whilst Chinese leaders spoke repeatedly about their hopes for the Organization to develop a cultural, political and economic identity, the first moves and structures to come to life focused on countering terrorism. A long-standing theme of common concern and interest amongst all members (the late 1990s were a period of some violence in the region), it is worth noting that the SCO was born three short months before the September 11, 2001 terror attacks which emanated from across the border in Afghanistan.
Track forwards 20 years and in 2013, President Xi Jinping used Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan as the place where he announced the ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’, the first of a pair of speeches which acted as the kick-off of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). While focused on economic development and prosperity, the BRI has at its conceptual core the idea that development will lead to stability, a salve to the problems of separatism, terrorism and extremism.
These two themes – worrying about extremism/terrorism and development leading to stability are key to understanding China’s interests in Central Asia. Bordering Xinjiang, one of China’s most sensitive regions, much of Beijing’s thinking towards Central Asia is shaped by events in Xinjiang or more clearly directed by authorities (or companies) in the region. China has undertaken numerous ‘develop the west’ domestic strategies over the past decades which have sought to increase development and stability in China’s western regions (Xinjiang). The most recent came in the wake of the 2009 riots in Xinjiang which led to at least 200 deaths in clashes between Uyghur and Han, and led to a huge internal economic boost to Xinjiang. This economic push has of course been paired with a constant and tightening security grip (which has in fact undermined some of the economic goals, something local officials and companies complain about). But all of this will only succeed if there is a stable and prosperous neighbourhood for Xinjiang to share a border with. The reality is that the region is as land-locked as any of the Central Asian powers that it borders.
This helps explain the connectivity narrative around the BRI that was born in the region. In trying to seek to open Xinjiang up to become a gateway for Eurasia, China needed to build roads, rail, pipelines and more. This would not only open up routes into and beyond the region, but also help tap the region’s rich natural resources which would help satisfy China’s inexhaustible domestic demand. It would also help alleviate Beijing’s concerns about the ‘Malacca Dilemma’ whereby a considerable part of China’s imported oil flows through the potentially precarious (and US-influenced) Malacca Straits.
But to simply see China’s interests in Central Asia through natural resources misses the bigger picture, where Chinese firms and interests can be found across Central Asian societies. Chinese firms are working in numerous sectors and are seen across the region as the biggest potential (or actual) investors. China is increasingly the region’s largest trading partner, as well as a critical route to international markets. It is worth reflecting the transformation that this is for the region, where during Li Peng’s visit, the vision was for hydrocarbons to flow from Central Asia (Turkmen fields) across China to Japan, the then-booming Asian economy. At the time, markets in western China were often filled with goods coming from the former Soviet space rather than the other way around. In 30 years, this flow has entirely reversed and more.
It is also useful to remember that the private sector is an important driver of Chinese interests in the region. Whilst there is a habit in western capitals to see China as a monolith, this is not the case and in particular in the economic sector where public and private players exist. Chinese Central Asian economic engagement is often as influenced by the state-owned sector as it is the private sector. For example, TikTok is a dominant market player, as are local Alibaba fronts targeting the local e-commerce markets. Huawei, ZTE, Oppo and Xiaomi are important players in the telco sector, and Chinese electric cars can increasingly be seen on the roads in Central Asian capitals. The point is that while state driven enterprise is important, there is a large private sector that also plays a role – which includes everything from internationally recognized brands like those listed, to smaller scale Chinese entrepreneurs seeking opportunity.
Domestic security concerns also remain important to Beijing, and in recent times the perception is that these problems are worsening in the wider region. Whilst China has not reported any violence within Xinjiang that they would associate with terrorism since February 2017, they have continued to advance policies towards Uyghur and other minorities in Xinjiang in advance of what they term ‘counter-extremism’. These concerns exist across the border in Central Asia as well, where China regularly lobbies and works with local authorities to pursue groups or individuals of concern. In Afghanistan a cadre of Uyghur militants operating under the name the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP) continue to operate, while the Islamic State group’s affiliate in Afghanistan (Islamic State of Khorasan Province, ISKP) has recently started to articulate a strong anti-Chinese sentiment highlighting in particular the plight of Uyghurs within Xinjiang. Further down in Pakistan, an even wider range of groups has started to articulate anger towards China (though more often than not, related to domestic issues rather than Xinjiang). Suffice to say, China sees a region to its west which is replete with potential risks and threats which they can tie to domestic terrorism concerns.
Beijing has also sought to advance a ‘soft power’ push into the region. This has been driven by Confucius and other educational Institutes, scholarships at multiple levels, advancing Chinese messaging through local media, lobbying local elites and driving home narratives of economic opportunity amongst the local populations. Driven both by Beijing and companies working in the region, the push is in part a recognition of the deep levels of Sinophobia that exist. These are often based on little more than racial prejudices, but they have a practical effect on the ability of Chinese firms to operate in the region. In Kazakhstan, major land deals had to be conducted discretely after large-scale public protest led to the government having to reconsider its plans. In Kyrgyzstan, a large logistics centre was abandoned when local protests escalated to the point that the company decided it was not worth the trouble. And there are many other examples.
This has created a strange tension in the region, where the discussion is often of China as the coming power and major investor, yet on the ground not many Chinese can be found. In part this is a choice – they recognize the Sinophobia they can face and simply stay discrete, or in some cases, companies simply tell their people to stay in compounds out of the public eye. But it is also sometimes driven by local authorities who find themselves under pressure to keep a reign on Chinese presence and pass laws seeking to ensure high percentages of ‘local content’ in any project implemented in Central Asia by Chinese firms.
It is worth pausing a moment to drill down a bit into China’s individual relations with each country, as while China engages with the region as a grouping – through a C5+ format that has become a vogue around the region – it also has clearly distinct policies towards each country. These very brief summaries serve to highlight a few key points.
Kazakhstan – was always seen as the backbone of China’s relations with the region, something that helps explain the fact it was the first country President Xi visited post-COVID. The foundation of the relationship is energy, but China has deep interests in other mineral resources in the country (uranium and copper to name two), while also worked on numerous infrastructure projects. The region was home to large Uyghur diaspora and dissident groups in the 1990s, though these were largely dealt with through bilateral security engagement. Beijing had always seen the country as amongst the most dependable in the region, though this was somewhat shattered by the trouble in the country in January 2022.
Kyrgyzstan – has largely been seen as a conduit for products elsewhere. Chinese firms have worked considerably on the country’s infrastructure, often through linked loans from national policy banks. The country has also been site of numerous terrorist attacks on Chinese nationals, including the murder of diplomats, officials, businessmen and in May 2016 a car bombing at the Embassy in Bishkek. There are deep tensions towards China in the country, though recently Beijing appears to have finally found a way through building a long-delayed train route through the country which would link China to Uzbekistan more directly (and then potentially onwards towards Caspian routes).
Tajikistan – came later as an economic partner with China given its relatively limited opportunities and small population. Chinese companies have been present and built some infrastructure, but more recently the push has been on the security side with China seeking to bolster Tajik capability at its border with Afghanistan. The country is less wealthy and has a smaller population than its neighbours and any infrastructure in the country is complicated by its exceptionally rugged geography.
Turkmenistan – China has in essence one interest in Turkmenistan and that is its gas. An early investor in the country, Chinese oil majors were willing to essentially do whatever the Turkmen wanted to secure access to the gas. This worked well, but has now set up a situation that is slightly awkward for Ashgabat whereby they are almost entirely dependent on one customer. They have sought consequently to diversify in all other directions, but find them challenging to achieve. Outside this, China does play a role in the Turkmen economy more widely, but the country’s wealth means it is able to pick and choose what it wants making it challenging for Chinese firms.
Uzbekistan – until the passing of first President Karimov, Uzbekistan was as closed to China as it was to everyone else. The subsequent opening up has been reflected in a surge of Chinese interest and activity, though this has not entirely overtaken Russian and Turkish investment. As the region’s most densely populated country, and traditional heart of the region, Uzbekistan is an interesting opportunity for Chinese traders, investors and businessmen which was on a rapid growth trajectory before the pandemic.
To turn instead to a few key issues that are worth considering when looking at the region and China against the wider backdrop of UK interests.
Afghanistan – the Wakhan Corridor that provides China’s direct link to Afghanistan is bordered on the north by Tajikistan and on the south by Pakistan. Consequently, Afghanistan is worth considering in China’s calculations. So far, Beijing has not filled the vacuum as was widely speculated following the Taliban takeover of Kabul. Rather China has trodden carefully, while its entrepreneurial cadre has leapt at the potential opportunities. Beijing engages Central Asia on Afghanistan, through involvement in various groupings including the SCO, regional Special Representative formats, as well as being willing to at least rhetorically support Central Asian narratives towards the region. In Tajikistan, China has developed one of its few overseas security bases – run by the People’s Armed Police (PAP) in Shaimak, along the country’s border with Afghanistan. The intention of this is to help China keep its own eyes on the potential problems that might overspill from Tajikistan. But overall, China has actually stayed relatively back from stepping into the mire in Afghanistan, preferring to instead try to keep a security buffer and engage with Central Asia (and anyone else interested) in trying to ensure the current situation does not de-stabilize further. What is important for the UK to note is that while China is a player in Afghanistan, it is still a relatively timid one, something Central Asians see as well.
Russia – there is a long-standing misreading of a regional division of labour around Central Asia between China and Russia. The myth says that China does the economics while Russia does security. Quite aside from the illogical nature of this calculation, the reality is that both are engaged in both sectors (and more). This does in some cases lead to competition, but for the most part, they seem happy to operate in parallel. During President Xi’s recent visit to Moscow, this comity was emphasized when they stated that they planned to coordinate their activities in Central Asia to a greater degree going forwards. The canard of seeking fissures between the two in Central Asia misses the wider problem that this growing proximity presents to Central Asia which finds itself operating in an increasingly limited geopolitical space. Central Asian strategists love to talk about their countries ‘multi-vector’ foreign policy which is able to balance people off each other, and play them against each other for their gain. But this strategic approach becomes highly challenging when your two biggest neighbours and partners are increasingly in lock-step with each other (even though recently, the balance of economics in the region has swung slightly back in Russia’s favour). The region will never be able to entirely reject China and Russia, but it is eager to develop options. What is important for the UK to note is that looking at the region as the place where China and Russia disagree is a waste of time which misses the real impact that Beijing and Moscow’s growing strategic alignment has on the region.
Uyghurs – unfortunately, the plight of Uyghurs in Xinjiang is not something that animates much policy discussion in Central Asia. While pockets of public support can be found, and at a government level behind closed doors people will often sympathise, the reality is that there is little interest or appetite to confront China on this issue. There have been some practical steps taken by the Kazakh authorities to get better treatment for ethnic Kazakhs caught up in the camps system, as well as work on individual cases, but this has not extended to wider condemnation. For many in the region, the Uyghurs living in China are simply citizens living under a different regime, and having to bear the consequences of that. This is important as lobbying at an official level for the region to condemn China on the issue is unlikely to generate any positive response, and is instead likely to simply close doors. This does not necessarily entirely preclude discrete support in some way, but it would be a challenging goal to achieve. At the same time, it is worth considering the ramifications of the Xinjiang and Uyghur related sanctions that have been passed in the US and Europe which may have a direct impact on Central Asian businesses (or UK investments in the region).
UK options
There is a great deal that the UK could do in Central Asia. As a country with high ‘soft power’ status across the region, strong business links, as well as one of only a few to have diplomatic representation in all five, the UK could gain a good return on investment were the region to garner more focused and consistent high-level diplomatic attention.
When thinking about China in this context, however, three areas are worth considering for UK policymakers:
First – engage with the reality of China as a player in Central Asia. This even means engaging with Chinese projects when they are being advanced. This does not necessarily mean working directly with the Chinese firms (though this might also be an option), but to instead work with locals to ensure that they are maximizing their benefits and seeing what ancillary projects could be done which would support local development.
Second – help foster a greater Central Asian collective narrative and policy development. One positive development of recent times has been a growing shift towards greater discussion in Central Asia of working together. While there are still deep issues and tensions between the five countries, there is also a clear effort being made to work together. This is in part a recognition of their difficult geographical realities of being between the Scylla and Charybdis of China and Russia (and Iran/Afghanistan), but also as this is now more possible given the passing of the first generation of leaders whose personal animosities sometimes kept relations between countries on ice. The UK should seek to find ways of supporting the fostering of a greater Central Asian policy identity as a way of empowering the region to manage its own affairs and through that become a critical western ally.
Third – the war in Russia has complicated routes north (though also increased regional economic dependence on Russia), while routes across Afghanistan remain limited and China is only just opening up again post-COVID. There has been a recent revival in attention towards trans-Caspian routes. While energy pipelines may be difficult to realize, expanding goods capability through strengthening of ports, rail and road links, and more creates a new route for Central Asia to Europe. Clearly this is also a route that China will be interested in, and is in fact already exploring supporting in various ways (the Kyrgyz railway for example). The route, however, would likely benefit Central Asia as much as China.
Finally, there is a need more widely for London to consider the Eurasian heartland to a greater degree in its strategic thinking. The recent Integrated Review (IR) Refresh made limited mention of Central Asia, and did not particularly consider in much detail the wide physical geographical space between the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific at which Central Asia sits at the heart. When thinking in geostrategic terms it seems strange to omit such a large part of the globe, especially as it is one where the two key strategic adversaries repeatedly mentioned in the IR have increased their presence and attention. Numerous threats (from geopolitical adversaries to terrorist threats) intersect in this region, and Central Asia stands out as a region which could play an important supportive role in managing these issues. To generate true strategic advantage, the UK should focus a greater degree of attention onto Central Asia.
My pace has slowed a bit of late, been doing lots of different things. Most will eventually land in one form or another, though the topics remain the same. This is for Lawfare, taking a look at another aspect of Russia’s asymmetrical efforts against the west, this time digging into their links with the extreme right in Europe. Part of a pair which fits alongside my earlier CTTA piece looking at Russia in Africa in particular. More on the terror/great power conflict nexus to come.
Vladimir Putin attends a press conference with Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte in Rome, Italy, on July 4, 2019. Photo credit: Office of the President of Russia; CC BY 4.0.
Editor’s Note: Russia’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine may lead it to escalate, or simply lash out, against Ukraine’s European allies. Raffaello Pantucci of the International Center for Political Violence and Terrorism Research examines ways in which Moscow might support extreme right-wing groups in Europe in order to sow chaos and raise the price of European support for Ukraine.
Daniel Byman
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NATO continues to thwart and confront Russia’s aggression in Ukraine through sanctions, political pressure, arms supplies, and economic support for Kyiv. Moscow’s direct response outside the battlefield, however, has been relatively limited beyond rhetoric and increasingly strident statements and actions on the international stage. But Moscow clearly sees Europe as the soft underbelly of the alliance and has increasingly used soft and hard measures to try to create friction and strike back. One key vector that Moscow might exploit is the far and extreme right in Europe, which has often tended in a pro-Russian direction.
Any Russian action in support of these groups is unlikely to be obvious. A hint of what might be coming may be visible in a series of letter bombs in Spain late last year; the New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence initially linked the attacks to a Russian intelligence effort that was working with extreme right-wing actors, but the bombs were ultimately traced to a lone individual who was inspired in part by Russian propaganda. Other traces could be found in the group of German “sovereign citizens” or “Reichsbürgers,” who were planning to overthrow the government before their arrest in December 2022. At least one of the suspects in the case was linked to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) political party, and the group had sought to make contact with Russian authorities to solicit help stabilizing their government once they had taken over. Moscow has long cultivated links with different parts of Europe’s right wing, from mainstream politicians to proscribed terrorists. Given existing social tensions in Europe, this provides an ideal space for Russian meddling.
Russia’s Ties to the European Far Right
Russia already has a means to act on these threats. The Russian Imperial Movement (RIM) is an international far-right group, which was listed as a specially designated terrorist organization by the United States in April 2020. The U.S. policy was “the first time in history” that the U.S. government had “designated a white supremacist group,” as then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pointed out at the time. Subsequent reporting highlighted how the group had provided training centers in St. Petersburg for Swedish, German, Slovakian, Finnish, and Danish right-wing radicals. One of the Swedes, Anton Thulin, was a member of the Nordic Resistance Movement and was jailed for bombing a refugee center in Gothenburg in 2017. That attack was one of three carried out by his cell; others targeted a Swedish left-wing organization and another refugee center. Upon his release, Thulin went to Poland where he sought additional training. RIM leader Stanislav Vorobyov has been linked to extreme-right groups across Europe. Other RIM members have trained and gone to fight in Ukraine in support of the Russian offensive. But the problem of far-right Russian sympathizers joining the fight goes well beyond just RIM—numerous Italian, French, and other European extremists have also elected to go and fight alongside Russian-supporting groups in Ukraine.
RIM is not the only strand of the terrorist extreme right that has ties to St. Petersburg. Shortly before RIM’s designation, investigations by the Guardian and the BBC uncovered that The Base, an international neo-Nazi accelerationist group, was being run from St. Petersburg by an American, Rinaldo Nazzaro, through a web of online platforms and encrypted applications used for recruitment and incitement. Nazzaro is accused of building networks of angry white men and instigating racially motivated attacks from his home in Russia. He has also appeared a few times in the Russian media from his new home (where he says he moved with his Russian wife in 2018 so that his child would not “grow up in the USA because I felt like it was too degenerate”) to criticize the West. While most of The Base’s targets seem to be in the United States, and U.S. members have been prosecuted, the group is also proscribed in the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. In the U.K., it has been linked to the recruitment of teenagers to extremist networks. Nazarro has declared that he has stepped back from The Base, but his online posting still highlights his support for the group’s ideas.
Russia’s connection to the German Reichsbürger plot is weaker but present. In that case, it appears that one of the plotters was previously a member of the far-right AfD political party directly involved in the support the party received from Moscow. Members of the network are accused of seeking direct links with Russia to gain support (the Kremlin denied playing any role). In another recent example, the AfD appears to have played a role in Russia’s recruitment of a senior German intelligence officer, who supplied Russia with information about the war in Ukraine.
The AfD links shows how other, less overtly violent parts of the far right also have ties to Russia. Britain First—a far-right group in the United Kingdom that has published material later found with individuals involved in violent attacks, and that was briefly promoted on Twitter by President Trump—has long been suspected of receiving support from Russia. Its leader, Paul Golding, has made at least three visits to Russia, spoken in the Duma, and praised President Vladimir Putin’s Russia on Russian television. U.K. police have investigated his financial affairs on the suspicion that he has been receiving money from sources in Moscow, and charged and convicted him for refusing to cooperate with an investigation after returning from a trip to Russia. Many other mainstream far-right politicians in Europe have also cultivated relations with Russia.
An Unpopular Time to Be Pro-Russia
Russia’s war in Ukraine has somewhat dulled the influence of these mainstream pro-Putin politicians—given the negative overall view of what Russia is doing in Europe, it’s harder to maintain public support while voicing support for Russia. Italy’s current government coalition includes leaders who have spoken openly of their support for Putin, but Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni made it a point to highlight her country’s support for Ukraine, and Matteo Salvini (who infamously wore a pro-Putin T-shirt in parliament) canceled a visit to Moscow that he had planned in June 2022, though he has also said that he thinks sanctions targeting Russia will damage Italy. At the extreme, Nazzaro has told supporters to steer clear of the war in Ukraine, which he sees as a pointless “NATO proxy war,” and Britain First has called for peace in the conflict on its Telegram channel but continued to support Russia.
The political winds in Europe are blowing against Russia and its supporters at the moment. But among the violent fringe, sympathetic groups and individuals still provide Putin a tool to destabilize Europe; some of these extremists are receiving military training and experience on the battlefield in Ukraine.
Russia has a long history of violently targeting opponents in Europe. From shooting Chechens in the streets of Berlin and Istanbul, to poisoning defected intelligence agents in the United Kingdom, to the dramatic deaths of various prominent Russian businessmen across Europe over the span of decades, Moscow’s enemies in Europe often fall prey to violent incidents. In addition, through its intelligence agencies, the Kremlin has worked to destabilize governments, meddle in public discourse and elections, and generally stir trouble wherever it can. In 2017, British intelligence reported a plot stirred by Russian agents to overthrow the government in Montenegro, and shortly before the Russian invasion, they pointed to a plot to install a puppet regime in Kyiv. More recently, Moldovan authorities released documents that appear to lay out Russia’s playbook for destabilizing their country and arrested Russian agents linked to the Wagner Group reportedly entering the country to carry out the plot.
Beyond Europe, Russia has attempted to spread its influence through other means, particularly using counterterrorism cooperation as a tool of engagement and influence. Russia has used arms sales and Wagner Group operations to supplant French influence and cultivate a reputation as a willing partner across Africa. It is now deploying a similar approach in Myanmar, where a long-standing defense relationship has now blossomed into bilateral engagement focused on counterterrorism as the military regime in Naypyidaw continues to attempt to put down resistance to its February 2021 coup. Russia has not hesitated to weaponize counterterrorism rhetoric and policies around the world as a tool for international engagement and to undermine Western influence.
But it is in Europe where Russia is likely to have the most impact fostering threats, in large part because its efforts in Europe build on existing fissures in society. For almost a decade, there has been a political crisis in Europe over immigration and fears of violent Islamist terrorism, which has stirred concern and paranoia among a growing number of people. This situation has led people to radicalize, some in mainstream politics where a growing number of parties focused on such issues have come to prominence, but also through growing extreme far-right and white supremacist groups on the fringes of European politics. Russia has exploited other political faultlines in Europe as well, interfering in the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, the Catalan separatist movement, and German, French, and Dutch elections.
Creating a Climate of Confusion
In some cases, the degree to which threats in Europe are being directed by Russia may be overstated. For example, British Islamist Anjem Choudary’s appearance on Russian platform VKontakte (a Facebook equivalent) could be ascribed to Moscow’s meddling, or it could just be a pragmatic choice by someone shunned on most other platforms to take advantage of VK’s lack of interest. It is possible to find links to Russia across a wide range of threats and problems, but not all of these are necessarily part of a wider plot.
It is also the case that the extreme right has ties to both sides of the battlefield in Ukraine. While it is clear that Russia is using some of these groups to support its cause, there are others that fight on the Ukrainian side. A recent cross-border incursion into Russia was undertaken by the Russian Volunteer Corps, a group led by a man who has unabashedly trumpeted his extreme right-wing views. And prior to the invasion, there was a steady trickle of men linked to extreme right-wing groups traveling to join the Ukrainian Azov battalion, which is associated with Nazi iconography and hardline nationalist beliefs.
This is a muddled state of affairs. Russian ties to extremists are often present, but not every instance of smoke indicates fire. The politics of the moment are defined by the war in Ukraine, but far-right extremists have divided sympathies. Despite this confusion, Europe has thus far proved durable as a Ukrainian ally, suggesting that any efforts by Russia to foster extremism and pro-Russian attitudes has not had much effect overall. European intelligence has stepped up its efforts at countering Russian penetration, and overt political support for Russia is not as appealing as it was prior to the invasion. The clientele of Russia’s influence operations are a fickle group of opportunists.
But this confusion is also a key part of Moscow’s playbook for asymmetric warfare. While Russia appears to have very few limits on what it will do and what tools it might deploy, its actions are not always linked to a specific goal. For the Kremlin, stirring trouble and creating confusion is often a good result in itself. But meddling with the extreme right and inciting terrorist groups creates problems that could be difficult for Russia to control. There is of course considerable irony in Russia trying to manipulate the far right in the midst of a war in which it claims to be fighting fascists. But Moscow is nothing if not flexible when it comes to fighting its wars and seeing who it can use to advance its cause.
A brief piece for the Diplomat trying to temper down some of the China-Russia hype and hysteria and just call the relationship what it is. A topic doubtless to return to.
China and Russia are not in lockstep across the board, but they are clearly in strategic alignment at a global level.
Credit: Russian Presidential Press and Information Service
There is an almost hysterical need to find fissures in the Sino-Russian relationship. Yet, the most obvious thing to come out from Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow was the fact that both he and President Vladimir Putin want to highlight to the world how close they are. No one forced Xi to go to Moscow, and Putin chose to make this a high-profile state visit. Their warm words to each other overheard as they left dinner may have seemed staged, but at the same time were unnecessary unless the point was to emphasize partnership. The endless search for gaps misses this clear strategic alignment which should be taken and reacted to at face value.
The narrative of underlying disagreement and dislike between Beijing and Moscow is likely born from the same place that the Cold War Two concept emerges from. During the first Cold War, China and Russia were at odds beneath their common Communist spirit, and the U.S. demonstrated impressive diplomatic deft in focusing on this to pull them apart. The times have changed, however, and the key thing now holding China and Russia together is an antipathy toward the West.
It is abundantly clear that there are disagreements between Moscow and Beijing at every level. India, for example, is a power that has a strong relationship with Moscow, but a violent one with China. The Russian intelligence service continues to detain scientists they claim are selling their country out to China. Shortly before Xi’s visit a group of Chinese miners were murdered in the Central African Republic, with the Chinese leader pledging their murders would be avenged. A rumor rattling around the Chinese internet was that they had been executed by Russian Wagner forces. All of this serves to show competing geopolitical interests as well as bilateral paranoia at a public level and within their respective security apparatuses.
Similarly, the economic sphere is riven with contradictions. No big gas deal has yet been signed – likely evidence of China deciding to play hardball on negotiations now that they have the upper hand and more options at hand (as well as the fact that to rebuild the infrastructure within Russia to shift European-facing gas to Asia will take some time). Yet at the same time, Moscow is clearly looking to sell more to China and Beijing is buying. Within the private sector, some Chinese firms see the evacuation of Western brands from Russia as a great market opportunity, while at the same time large tech firms like Huawei or Alibaba are pulling people out or suspending investments. Opportunity and fear of secondary sanctions are often wrapped up together.
But in focusing on all of these contradictions, we are missing that this is often the nature of international relations. To paraphrase British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston: Countries have interests, not friendships. The transatlantic alliance may have NATO binding it together, but is equally riven with contradiction and disagreement – Turkey’s role in the negotiations around Finnish and Swedish membership has highlighted this. European and American companies usually compete on the international stage and within each other’s markets, while the authorities seek to protect their own national firms. And it is worth remembering that we are only two short decades since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq – a war that tore at the fabric of the transatlantic alliance.
It is hard to understand why we cannot then see this echoed in the China-Russia relationship. Both have problems, disagreements, and contradictions with each other, and yet their leaders are happy to grandstand together on the world stage.
The overarching issues they wanted highlighted during this encounter was their proximity and the fact that they are both pushing forward the development of a non-Western led order (made up of institutions like BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and more). At an individual level, Beijing struck its pose as the peacemaker seeking to help resolve the Ukraine war (building on its success in the Middle East between Riyadh and Tehran), while Moscow got high level support on the global stage.
We have yet to see Beijing’s support go beyond this to actually arming Russia with the lethal hardware that they want to fight in Ukraine. And we have yet to see Moscow try to force Beijing to do something they do not want to do in advance of Russia’s interests.
The final point to make is that while it may be clear that Beijing increasingly has the whip hand in the relationship, this does not in itself necessarily mean anything. Growing Russian dependence on China does not hand all the chips to Beijing, but merely strengthens China’s hand in individual negotiations and potentially weakens Russian domestic capability in the longer run. This does not, however, lock Moscow into doing whatever Beijing wants. China has a few other “allies” in its immediate neighborhood where on paper it also has the “whip hand” – Pakistan, North Korea, and Myanmar – and in each case, Beijing struggles to get them to do what China might want. In fact, these countries have a tendency to do what they want rather than what China tells them to do, which sometimes actually appear to go against Beijing’s interests.
The West should take the Sino-Russian relationship at face value, focus less on how to pull the two apart and instead de-hyphenate them in their strategic thinking. They are not in lockstep across the board, but they are clearly in strategic alignment at a global level. Focusing on the relationship in this way will help identify where the differences mean one cares less than the other and therefore is a place where thinking of them as a union would be a distraction. It might also then offer some ideas as to where actually the differences in opinion matter on the ground, rather than seeking ones where little strategic advantage can be leveraged between Beijing and Moscow.
Another article for South China Morning Post from a month or so back looking at how China’s role on the world stage is changing and its impact. A topic for lots of research and thinking in the future.
It remains to be seen how much China will enforce the agreement, given its dislike of confrontation, but that matters less than others engaging with Beijing.
The world order is shifting and the West needs to find a better way to answer the offer Beijing is putting on the table than simply dismissing it.
President Xi Jinping is greeted by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman after his arrival in Riyadh on December 8, 2022. China’s recent rise in engagement with the Middle East is part of a larger diplomatic push to portray itself as a force for peace. Photo: Saudi Press Agency via AP
Beijing deserves credit for seizing the opportunity to support Saudi-Iranian rapprochement. While it is premature to say China has displaced the United States in the Middle East through this deal, coming amid reports that President Xi Jinping is to meet both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin, it does highlight the appeal of Beijing’s approach to foreign policy to a wider audience than is sometimes appreciated in the US or Europe.
As far as can be understood, China came into the process for the Saudi-Iranian deal relatively late. Iraq and Oman also played an important brokering role, one that both Tehran and Riyadh actively sought out as they attempted to tone down their tensions. Even so, it is clear that Beijing played an important role in clearing the final hurdles to the agreement and reportedly offered some critical backstops and guarantees.
It remains to be seen how much Beijing will act as an enforcer and whether it will step in to chide either side if they fail to live up to their responsibilities within this framework. Similarly, we will have to wait and see what, if any, tangible deliverables China can obtain in its attempts to mediate between Putin and Zelensky.
But in many ways, from a Chinese perspective, these details are less significant at this point. This is part of a wider push since the end of China’s zero-Covid policy, one which demonstrates an alternative international order that Beijing can offer. Xi’s travel itinerary since last September has included attending a Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Uzbekistan, the Group of 20 summit in Jakarta, the Apec forum in Bangkok and the China-Gulf Cooperation Council Summit in Riyadh.
These are all platforms where the West has less of a presence and where China gets a warmer reception. They are also replete with powers that appreciate Beijing’s less-judgmental approach to international affairs and how they behave at home. Some also see China as a rich potential investor and important economic partner, which blunts their desire to take a confrontational approach.
At the same time, Chinese diplomacy seeks to push a narrative of positive engagement on the world stage. The publication of the Global Security Initiative white paper in English was an illustration of what a Chinese-led security order might look like.
While China’s peace proposals for Ukraine have received a mixed reaction in the West, they are a way for Beijing to highlight that, unlike other members of the UN Security Council, it is offering peaceful options to end the war in Ukraine. The fact that Xi is now stepping in to engage suggests that Beijing thinks it already has something agreed that will be presented. The clear narrative will be China as peacemaker.
One can be sceptical about how long such moves by Beijing on the big strategic questions of our time might last. A key problem when trying to mediate between two sides is that, when they breach agreements, they need to be held to account or told to do things they do not want to do or hear. These are difficult conversations that Beijing is not usually eager to hold. Peace agreements that need to be enforced can lead to tensions.
In many ways, though, this does not matter. The fact that all these powers are willing and eager to engage with Beijing and use China as an interlocutor is a reflection of China’s growing soft power on the world stage.
It is not necessarily that China is adored or that any of these powers really think this is the end of their problems. It is more that China is stepping in and offering something different. Given the intractable nature of the problems, this is positive messaging that is welcome in a world that appears to be increasingly moving towards a bipolar geopolitical conflict.
It is also further evidence, if any was needed, that the West will find it difficult to paint the struggle it sees itself locked into against China, Russia and Iran through the current binary lens. The reality is that other countries have agency and, as we are increasingly seeing, China does too.
The world order might not have been transformed, but it is shifting. The West needs to find a better way to answer the offer Beijing is putting on the table than simply dismissing it. The deep scepticism many Chinese efforts receive is understandable, but it misses the reality that this is not how the rest of the world always sees things.
Elsewhere, people will look at China’s proposals and its attempts at mediation as evidence of Beijing offering something new which, while not perfect, is at least not simply stoking the flames of conflict. Whether this narrative will hold remains to be seen, but the immediate narrative victory has clearly been won.
Raffaello Pantucci is a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London and a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) in Singapore
A longer piece for my institutional home in Singapore RSIS and our quarterly journal Counter Terrorism Trends and Analyses (CTTA), this one exploring the great power conflict and terrorism nexus in Africa. The focus is mostly on Russia, but China gets a brief mention too. Am continuing to do a lot of work on the confluence of the two issues which are at the heart of the big geopolitical questions we are seeing play out at the moment.
In parts of the world, there is a growing confluence between terrorist threats and great power conflict. Nowhere has this been clearer than in Africa, where a growing Russian presence under the auspices of counter terrorism is steadily pushing out western forces in an ever-expanding space. The danger for the longer term is that as counter terrorism becomes a proxy for conflict between great powers, attention on such security threats slips under the radar, leaving space for them to grow and multiply further.
Introduction
In December 2021, the political directors of the “Small Group of the Global Coalition to Defeat Daesh/ISIS” – an offshoot of the larger Global Coalition to Defeat Daesh/ISIS which was formed in September 2014 to defeat the terrorist group – met in Belgium to discuss the state of the conflict against the Islamic State (IS).[1] Amongst other announcements to emerge from the session, an “Africa Focus Group” was formed to permit the coalition to “undertake civilian capacity-building programs to help address the ISIS threat across Africa”.[2] The Coalition’s decision to focus on Africa followed a growing pattern of threat assessments which pointed to the continent as the new heart of the IS threat. According to the Global Terrorism Index, in 2021, almost 50 per cent (around 3,461) of the deaths attributed to IS worldwide took place in sub-Saharan Africa.[3] Yet, there has since been a steady retreat by Western counter terrorism forces across Africa as alliances are tested, and a growing Russian presence in Africa pushes the terrorist threat into becoming a strand of the wider geopolitical clashes buffeting the world.
2021 proved to be a particularly challenging year for Western efforts to counter terrorism in Africa. In May, Mali suffered its second coup in a year, leading to a breakdown in relations between Paris – a key player across the Sahelian, mostly Francophone, region – and Bamako. Both France and the United States temporarily suspended aid, only to restart it later in the year. By February 2022, however, Paris concluded the relationship was entirely broken and decided to close down the longstanding Operation Barkhane, which had started in 2013 as part of an effort to counter the growing violent Islamist threat that had almost enveloped the country.
Key behind this French decision was a growing frustration in Paris at the government in Bamako’s unwillingness to fulfil its commitments to the international community,[4] as well as their growing reliance on the Russian private military company (PMC) Wagner. In announcing his forces’ withdrawal, President Emmanuel Macron of France stated that Wagner was “arriving in Mali with predatory intentions”. He went on to condemn the Russian presence in Libya and Central African Republic and their alleged “awful abuses against the civilian population”.[5]
The Russian Dimension
Wagner’s presence in Africa is part of a much wider Russian push into the continent which stretches back two decades. In the mid-2000s, Moscow sought to reinvigorate its relationships around Africa as part of an attempt to return the country to the global status that it held during the Soviet era. A major early focus was South Africa, where many of the African National Congress (ANC) party leadership had strong links to Russia through training they had undergone in the country during the period of anti-apartheid struggle.[6] However, it was after the first Russian invasion of Ukraine and seizure of Crimea in 2014 that relations with Africa accelerated, particularly in the security domain. During 2015-2019, Russia signed some 19 government-to-government military agreements in Africa, mostly focused on arms sales.[7]
Wagner, or Russian PMCs more generally, are the latest expression of this Russian push, though it is one that has (until recently) been denied by the Kremlin and its associates. According to research by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C., Russian PMCs are identifiable in an African context going back to 2016. The growing relationship was brought into a clearer public focus in October 2019, when Moscow held a Russia-Africa Summit in Sochi where 43 heads of states were hosted by President Vladimir Putin at an event that was heavily focused on Russian defence cooperation and military sales with the continent.[8] Throughout this period, Wagner forces were identified as present across the region, playing roles in conflicts in Libya, Sudan, Mozambique, Madagascar, Central African Republic and Mali. In most conflicts, the role was supportive of local authorities and focused on a counter terrorism mission.
It has not always worked, with Mozambique proving an example of where the local IS affiliate was seemingly able to push Wagner out of the country.[9] More worrying, however, has been evidence of Wagner‘s involvement in reported human rights abuses and massacres, issues that are likely to only inflame the tensions which underpin the narratives that foster extremism in the first place.[10]
Western Cooperation and Challenges
For local leaders, Russia’s willingness to provide uncritical support is attractive. This, alongside active disinformation campaigns which seek to play on local tensions with former European colonisers[11] as well as cultivate local figures to help lay the groundwork for Russia’s arrival,[12] have created a context where Russia is seen as a positive alternative to Western partners. Part of the problem for Western countries, however, is that there is often a poor track record of their own efforts in countering terrorism across the region. This can be seen through two metrics: first, the unintended consequence of working through and building up local security forces; and second, through the bitter reality that terrorist groups in the region have been able to expand considerably in the past decade. For example, rather than shrinking, IS has only grown across the continent, while two of Al-Qaeda (AQ)’s most effective remaining affiliates – Al-Shabaab in East Africa and Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM) in North Africa – have continued to thrive.
One of the major pillars of Western counter terrorism efforts in Africa has been to develop local forces who are then able to help lead the local efforts at countering terrorist group expansion. This has, unfortunately, generated some unintended consequences. For example, Africa has seen 12 coup d’états since 2020.[13] Many (if not all) have been led by officers who had been through training programmes guided by the US (or allied) military under the aegis of counter terrorism cooperation.[14] In a particularly awkward moment, in September 2021, soldiers being trained under such a programme in Guinea left their US Green Beret trainers to participate in the overthrow of the authorities in the capital Conakry.[15] In Somalia, the special force developed by the US to counter Al-Shabaab and IS became so entangled in local politics that it had to suspend its counter terrorism activities.[16] In both cases, the core counter terrorism goals for which the forces were initially assembled were clearly impacted, even if only temporarily.
Another problem is that local forces do not always follow the rules of engagement or practise behaviour that their Western supporters would like or train them for. A recent grim Reuters investigation uncovered massive human rights abuses by Nigerian military forces in their conflict against militants in the northeast of the country.[17] Earlier reports in Kenya linked the elite Western-supported anti-terrorism force to numerous extrajudicial killings.[18] One such murder that was never resolved was the shooting of extremist cleric Mohammed Rogo, a senior figure in East African jihadist circles with close links to Al-Shabaab and AQ networks around the region. Shot in his car in September 2012, his murder led to widespread violence and radicalisation but was never formally solved.[19] His image continues to feature prominently in extremist material emanating from both IS- and AQ-linked groups across East Africa.
Growth of Extremist Groups
The most obvious expression of failure, however, has been the growth of extremist groups in Africa. During the pandemic, for example, Africa was one of the few places where terrorist threats and violence actually increased.[20] The Islamic State of Western Africa Province (ISWAP) has, in particular, shown itself to be a highly successful organisation which has displaced the AQ-aligned Boko Haram as the preeminent extremist group in the Lake Chad basin.[21] Groups operating in the Sahel linked to both IS- and AQ-backed groups in the region have increasingly expanded their presence south, reaching into countries previously untouched by such problems, like Benin and Togo.
On the opposite end of the continent, Al-Shabaab continues to be highly resilient, substantial and ambitious in the face of repeated campaigns against it.[22] Threat groups in Central African Republic (CAR), Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have all adopted IS messaging and links highlighting the group’s ideological expansion across the continent. Some of these links appear to be supported by money flowing between them,[23] while in other cases there is clear frustration by the African affiliates that they are not able to get the attention of the core IS leadership.[24]
Evolving CT Support
All of this has taken place against a context in which Western forces have continued to seek deployments and play roles in countering terrorist groups in the continent. It is consequently not entirely surprising (notwithstanding clear disinformation campaigns and likely corrupt practices by Russian actors) to find that local authorities find Western support efforts ineffective and are willing to explore other alternatives like those offered by Russia. The answer to this so far by Western governments has been to try to call out Russian efforts, but also to withdraw and seek to support more local initiatives to undertake counter terrorism efforts in the region.
For example, following the collective withdrawal from operations in Mali by Western forces, the decision was made to support the Accra agreement, which called for regional powers using structures like the G5 grouping and ECOWAS (with African Union support) to take a leadership role in working with the Malian authorities to deal with the threats they face.[25] This partner-led effort is at the core of the current US thinking, which seeks to encourage local forces to take on the militant groups, with the US and other allies playing a supportive role in the background.
This has not, however, stopped Western forces continuing to take a proactive kinetic role where required. The recent death of IS in Somalia leader Bilal al-Sudani in a US special forces raid highlighted this, and his death is merely the latest in a long list of kinetic actions that the US in particular has taken across the continent to deal with specific menaces.[26] France has continued to undertake such missions too – for example, the killing of Islamic State in Greater Sahara (ISGS) leader Adnan Abou Walid al Sahraoui, even as French forces withdrew from Mali.[27] Such strikes demonstrate a capability by Western forces to reach in and strike individuals of concern, even as the wider operating environment becomes complicated. Whether this overwatch capability can be maintained as forces withdraw further will have to be seen.
However, it is clear that this targeted kinetic capability and local security development is unlikely to eradicate terrorism on the continent. The deep-seated issues that foster an environment in which extremist groups can grow goes far deeper. In part to answer this, there has been an increasing push to increase aid and support to Africa. Over time, billions of dollars have been spent on the continent, and this has been further boosted. The US has promised a new fund of some US$2 billion this year,[28] while the EU has offered hundreds of millions through different funds (for example, a €100 million fund to support teachers,[29] a €175 million for humanitarian aid in Central and West Africa,[30] and an additional €25.5 million in humanitarian aid in January 2023[31]), as well as a promise of a whopping €150 billion in investment over seven years at the EU-Africa Summit in February 2022.[32]
At the same time, there has been an effort to push a narrative of trying to help Africa stand up and develop by itself and not simply be an aid recipient – something reflected in US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s January 2023 10-day visit to Africa, which sought to highlight the ambition with which the United States wanted to engage with the continent.[33]
Jostle For Geopolitical Influence
The driver of this engagement, however, is not counter terrorism (even though the aid may help to deal with some of the underlying development issues which underpin radicalisation), but rather a range of issues from migration (in a European-specific context), to wider geopolitical plays against China and Russia. Both powers are perceived to be increasingly competing for influence in Africa, using a mix of hard security, investment, aid, development and wider support. This plays against the wider context of geopolitical competition between the West and China-Russia. China, in particular, has offered billions to a variety of African countries in terms of infrastructure investments and opportunities. Russia has contributed less in these terms, but has sought to offer some non-military support in the form of food or hydrocarbons.
Whilst there is little evidence of the two directly cooperating in Africa, it is clear that both China and Russia have identified counter terrorism as an issue through which they can engage with Africa to Western detriment and ultimately their own benefit. Whilst Moscow’s activities have already been highlighted, China has sought to displace the US from key counter terrorism bases in Kenya[34] as well as spoken at a United Nations (UN) level against sanctions placed on African countries dealing with terrorist threats.[35] This has translated into support for China and Russia in other UN votes, for example, on issues surrounding Xinjiang or Ukraine. Highlighting how much geopolitics has started to become entangled with local issues, the South African Development Community (SADC), made up of 16 nations, actively condemned US legislation that sought to counter Russian malign influence in Africa.[36] Counter terrorism, it appears, has become a tool of great power conflict in Africa.
Outlook
The specific impact on Western counter terrorism efforts continues. The current focus of attention is Burkina Faso, which, following a coup last year, has appeared to follow the path already taken by neighbouring Mali and turned on France as a counter terrorism partner. This led to a decision by Paris to close down its counter terrorism operation there as well.[37] Again, similar to developments in Mali,[38] this was preceded by an active Russian disinformation campaign as well as consistent rumours of Wagner deployment.[39] It is not clear that this is going to happen, but there has been a noticeable volume of statements from the government in Ouagadougou that the relationship with Moscow has been strengthening. Should Wagner, the private military firm, be deployed, it will be widely interpreted as further evidence of Western loss and Russian gain, with little focus actually paid to the terrorist threat which underpins the security attention in the first place.
This is likely to be the most damaging effect of the growing focus on African terrorism through the lens of great power politics. The attention on the actual threat will likely fall to the wayside as powers compete for influence or seek to keep each other out. This could create a space in which groups can develop further or, as has been seen in the context of some Russian deployments, problems actually get worse. And while thus far, most Africa groups appear quite regionally focused, the danger is that over time, a capability and space could develop into which more dangerous outward-facing groups could establish themselves.
About the Author
Raffaello Pantucci is a Senior Fellow at the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research (ICPVTR), a constituent unit of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He can be reached at israffaello@ntu.edu.sg
[24] A letter emerged in 2022 which seemed to suggest that the ISWAP head had been sending communications to ISIS core as early as 2017 and receiving no reply.
Have not been posting here for some time, keeping busy with projects elsewhere, so a few pieces to catch up on. First up, something for the South China Morning Post from all the way back in February looking at when Iranian President Raisi visited Beijing. As it turned out, a prelude to the Chinese supported Iran-Saudi deal.
Sanctioned and isolated, Tehran has less to offer Beijing than Moscow, which can at least boast a powerful military and global presenceWithin Iran, there is also wariness of Chinese investment, and not even shared concerns about Afghanistan have helped to spur cooperation
There is a third leg in the alliance of powers against which the West is facing off that has always seemed a little wobblier than the other two. The China-Russia relationship is as tight as ever, and the Russia-Iran link is only hardening as Tehran steps up its military support to Moscow.
The China-Iran link, however, seems more troubled. Last week’s visit by Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi to Beijing has been sold as an opportunity to bolster cooperation, but even with a high-profile boost, it is unlikely to come anywhere close to the strength of the other two.
China needs Iran even less than it needs Russia. Moscow is, in fact, an important partner for Beijing. Putting to one side the complicated and often contradictory economic relationship, which is clearly shifting ever more firmly in China’s favour, Russia is a United Nations Security Council member and a nuclear power whose army is able to increasingly command global presence.
It may have made a major strategic blunder in its invasion of Ukraine, but it remains a significant player on the world stage and serves an important role for Beijing.
In contrast, Iran is a heavily sanctioned and isolated power that produces little that Beijing immediately needs. Its rich hydrocarbon supplies are of interest to China, as is its large consumer population and open market for outside infrastructure investors. But these are all things that China can also find elsewhere.
Iran does not sit at the heart of any international structures that are useful to China’s efforts to blunt the growing push by the West to isolate Beijing on the world stage. In fact, Iran is desperately keen to join Chinese structures – like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) – to demonstrate that it still has important allies.
Nowhere has this relatively limited dependence been on greater display than after President Xi Jinping visited the China-Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) summit in Riyadh late last year. A joint communique issued after the summit highlighted GCC members’ concerns about Iranian behaviour in shared waters.
The statement generated public rebukes of China by Tehran. At the same time, these were very carefully delivered by the Iranian government as the country still wants to develop a better relationship with China.
The much-vaunted 25-year strategic cooperation deal valued in the hundreds of billions that was signed between the two countries in 2021 was meant to lead to huge levels of investment, and while it has led to some reported projects, it is moving slowly. China continues to import Iranian oil – and not much else – though often reportedly routing the oil via United Arab Emirates or Malaysia to mask its origin.
Chinese firms are still hesitant to operate in Iran due to a fear of secondary sanctions. At the time of the visit, the Iranian press was reporting that Iranian companies had restarted work on the Yadavaran oilfield which had initially been awarded to Sinopec but which they had suspended work on six years ago.
There is considerable resistance to China on the ground in Iran as well. In the wake of the announcement of the 25-year strategic partnership deal, a version of the document was leaked online, leading to a number of senior figures speaking out against it.
Former president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, previously an eager ally of China’s when in power, expressed concern as part of his lobbying to return to power, recognising the public sentiment against the deal, while other senior leaders highlighted the plight of Uygurs as something the authorities should focus on with China.
Even more recently, a prominent Iranian think tank close to the government published a report which outlined concerns about Chinese “debt trap” diplomacy, drawing on studies of Chinese-supported projects in other locations coming to conclusions which it specifically linked to potential projects signed under the 25-year deal.
Iran also fits awkwardly into a number of other Chinese relationships on the world stage. Xi’s visit to Riyadh was part of a much larger effort by Beijing in the Middle East, and part of a strong push by Saudi Arabia to expand its influence around Asia. Similarly, Israel is an important partner for Beijing – though one whose loyalties to Washington complicate things.
Both Israel and Saudi Arabia are implacable adversaries of Iran, and locked into confrontation with it in various locations around the world. Israel, in particular, has shown itself capable of reaching deep into Iran to go after specific individuals or targets.
Finally, there is the reality of Afghanistan, a country that physically separates China from Iran and is currently governed by the relatively unstable Taliban authorities. While the two countries have engaged on the topic and share very similar concerns, there is little evidence of cooperation between the two.
In fact, the Taliban is often keen to highlight Iranian firms as alternatives to Chinese ones in their pursuit of external investment in the country. In other words, the one place where Chinese and Iranian direct interests collide, the two are in competition.
The reality is that the China-Iran relationship is as unbalanced as the China-Russia one, though the dependency from Iran’s direction is far more substantial. Moscow is as needy of Beijing, but in many ways has more cards that are useful to China. This power dynamic was on prominent display during this week’s visit, which was high on rhetoric with the substance still to be delivered.
Raffaello Pantucci is a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London and a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) in Singapore
A new column for Nikkei Asia Review looking at the China-Russia relationship. Was initially drafted ahead of Wang Yi’s visit, but then pivoted a bit to reflect it, though nothing during the visit particularly surprised. Doubtless this will be a major talking point this year.
Raffaello Pantucci is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore and author of “Sinostan: China’s Inadvertent Empire.”
This week’s visit to Moscow by Wang Yi, China’s top diplomat, just ahead of the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, highlights the closeness of the two powers.
But grand rhetoric about the strength the relationship and revived U.S. assertions that Beijing is considering upgrading the quality of its military support to Moscow are overshadowing the day-to-day reality that China and Russia are on very different tracks.
Beijing has been coy about the invitation extended by Russian President Vladimir Putin in a year-end call with Xi Jinping for the Chinese leader to pay a visit this spring, although it was reiterated by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in late January.
While Beijing may not want to appear to commit yet as to when Xi will visit Moscow, he and Putin are due to meet midyear at a Shanghai Cooperation Organization leaders’ summit to be held in India and again in Durban, South Africa, at a BRICS summit in August.
In the meantime, China has continued to make it clear that its relationship with Russia is important. Visiting Moscow earlier this month, Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu said, “China is willing to work with Russia to implement the important consensus reached by the two heads of state and to promote new progress in bilateral relations in the new year.”
Doubtlessly, throughout the year we will continue to hear affirmations of the two nations’ friendship. This is likely to continue to be reflected in military exercises, which are increasingly held with other nations as well.
Chinese and Russian vessels are now engaged with South African counterparts in a large-scale, 10-day naval exercise off KwaZulu-Natal province that began on Friday.
Moscow and Beijing are happy to mutually antagonize others with these activities. Last December, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno expressed “severe concerns” over frequent joint air force activities by Russia and China near Japanese airspace. The two have undertaken similar exercises regularly around South Korean airspace and conducted joint exercises with Iranian forces.
Yet if one digs deeper, there is little evidence of significant cooperation that might advance more tangible goals, despite U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s claims about Chinese support for Russia’s war effort.
For example, the growing volume of Russian troops and mercenaries in Africa seems to be doing little to help protect the many Chinese businessmen who keep getting kidnapped by militant groups. In Tajikistan, both Moscow and Beijing have military posts near the Afghan frontier but they do not work together and the Russians reportedly have complained that the Chinese there do not even communicate with them.
At the same time, Russian counterintelligence continues to detain senior scientists for alleged selling sensitive technology to China. Last June, for example, physicist Dmitry Kolker was detained on charges of suspected treason involving collaboration with China.
A similar pattern can be found at an economic level.
Both sides champion the fact that bilateral trade rose 29.3% last year to reach $190 billion. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in January that Moscow is looking forward this year to finding ways of harmonizing China’s Belt and Road Initiative with the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union. Russian central bankers are proud too of their shift away from Western currencies to the yuan.
Yet the reality is that much of the growth in trade volumes in 2022 came in crude oil and coal sales where China took advantage of discounted supplies from Russia, which has been faced with a shrinking pool of customers.
Chinese companies continue to express concern about how they can keep up purchases of Russian energy and to seek new ways to protect themselves from sanctions while also worrying about insurance coverage. And while there is growing evidence that Chinese companies are still selling high technology products like microchips to Moscow, the companies doing this are often either hiding their tracks or have publicly withdrawn from the Russia.
Lenovo and Xiaomi, which both were major players in the Russian tech market before the war, quietly scaled back operations dramatically last year. Huawei Technologies moved many staff to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan while closing some units. And Russian consumers seeking to use UnionPay cards to replace the Visa, American Express or Mastercard credit cards that no longer work increasingly find the Chinese cards do not function either.
Of course, this does not mean that Chinese products are disappearing from Russia. In reality, Chinese products are increasingly present but often arrive indirectly which can raise costs for consumers. The trade in non-sanctioned goods is likely to increase with the opening of two new bridges across the Amur River.
The problem for Russia is that its dependence on China keeps getting deeper. For now, China may be providing a lifeline, but there is high risk to this position as well.
In trading the dollar for the yuan, the Russian central bank is binding itself to a currency which is tightly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party and is answerable to its needs. Opening Russia’s markets to greater Chinese penetration is only going to emasculate the domestic economy and make it harder for local competitors to survive.
For all the lofty rhetoric, there continues to be a disparity in the China-Russia relationship. Despite frequent demonstrations of affection, there are distinct limits to this partnership.
Another piece from last month, this time for the South China Morning Post, exploring China’s continuing reticence to put itself forwards as a player in international affairs. Stands in contrast to their recent peace push on Ukraine, but then there is a difference between the surface and behind the scenes view in Beijing.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Afghanistan’s instability are blockages to Beijing’s vision for Eurasia, but it has done little to fix either
In the decade since the belt and road was first discussed, China has become a major player in the region, yet it appears unwilling to step in to help resolve conflicts
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Afghanistan’s instability are blockages to Beijing’s vision for Eurasia, but it has done little to fix eitherIn the decade since the belt and road was first discussed, China has become a major player in the region, yet it appears unwilling to step in to help resolve conflicts
This year marks the first decade of the Belt and Road Initiative. While the vision might have evolved from the speeches President Xi Jinping gave in Astana and Jakarta in 2013, it remains a key concept that has been enshrined in Communist Party doctrine. The territory it started marching across has changed dramatically, but what has not yet changed is China’s willingness to step into a leadership role within this space.
Most glaringly, this is visible in the two major conflicts that now dominate the Eurasian heartland where the initiative was launched. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year has upended the regional and global order, while the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in mid-2021 has left an unstable state at the heart of the Eurasian land mass.
Together, these countries and their troubles present a major strategic blockage for China’s wider vision. However, there has been little evidence of Beijing seeking to fix either.
In fact, China seems set on simply letting both clashes play themselves out while offering platitudes in public which serve to suggest Beijing might seek to do something. In both contexts, China is a logical option to play a role in trying to resolve matters, and those on the ground are keenly aware of this.
Before the Russian invasion, China was Ukraine’s most important trading partner and a growing investor. The Belt and Road Initiative swept across Eurasia and saw Ukraine as a key link between Europe and Asia. With infrastructure and raw materials, technologically savvy and an underdeveloped economy on the European Union’s borders – it was a highly attractive prospect for Chinese investors.
Russia’s war has stymied these dreams while also posing a major threat to planned investments by Chinese firms in Belarus. Chinese companies and banks had intended the country to become a way station for products coming from China into Europe’s wealthy markets. But projects now sit idle while investors try to figure out how to adapt to the new reality.
In Afghanistan, China has long been the country’s wealthiest neighbour, with both Beijing and the Taliban government eager to find ways of encouraging Chinese investment. Neither has found that easy, though the Taliban appears to be following the path of the previous government after it signed a contract with a China National Petroleum Corporation subsidiary to exploit oilfields in the north of the country earlier this month.
CNPC had previously signed an agreement with the Afghan republic government in 2012 to extract oil from the same area, but that failed to live up to expectations. Other projects remain in the discussion phase, with growing appeals from the Taliban for Chinese firms to start to deliver.
But while it remains to be seen if the project lives up to its promise, the investment has shown that China is still in a position to play an important role. This is true in other parts of Eurasia, too.
The announcement that a Chinese firm could step in to develop Tehran’s international airport follows Beijing’s willingness to purchase Russian energy. China increasingly seems willing to serve as an economic backstop to countries being sanctioned by the West, and in so doing it can strengthen its position as a critical player across Eurasia.
However, there has been little evidence of China using this influence to seek to resolve problems or step in to advise leaders. Notwithstanding the rhetoric about wanting a peaceful resolution to the war in Ukraine and statements about respecting national sovereignty, there is no evidence that Beijing has sought to restrain Moscow.
Vague comments about not wanting nuclear conflict or wider instability are hardly attempts to steer Russian President Vladimir Putin in a particular direction, but are merely statements of fact. Nevertheless, Ukraine continues to hope that Beijing might step in to mediate.
In Afghanistan, China has found it as hard as everyone else to engage the Taliban. The recent oil project was driven by the company rather than the state. In fact, not long before the contract was signed, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs warned nationals in the country to consider leaving given the deteriorating security situation, highlighted by an attack on a Chinese-owned hotel in Kabul.
Economic activity in Afghanistan has, for the most part, been driven by the private sector. China has provided some aid, but it has not stepped into the economic void.
This is the critical point. China is clearly viewed as a significant player, yet it remains unwilling to step into the fray. From a Chinese perspective, this is just an extension of Beijing’s principle of non-interference but, in reality, it means that one of Eurasia’s mightiest rising powers is failing to play a leadership role in its own backyard.
A decade on from the announcement of the Belt and Road Initiative, China has risen to become a major player in Eurasia. But it has yet to do much with this power and influence, choosing instead to focus on the United States and Taiwan, and simply assuming a watching brief over the growing instability. The vision of the belt and road, at least for others, was for the initiative’s sweep across Eurasia to increase China’s influence. That has yet to translate into reality.
Raffaello Pantucci is a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London and a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) in Singapore
The second of my contributions to this year’s Counter Terrorist Trends and Analyses (CTTA) Annual Assessment for my Singaporean home RSIS, this time with excellent colleague Kali looking at the extreme right wing.
The violent edge of the extreme right in the West, in attack terms, has continued to be on a downward trend as in the past few years. There were no large-scale extreme right-wing attacks in Europe, North America or Australasia in 2022 – with isolated lone actors being the only ones responsible for casualties in advance of the ideology. At the same time, there were numerous arrests in a growing range of locations, and the underlying mobilising narratives of anti establishmentarianism, anti-immigration, anti-Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer + (LGBTQ+), racist and white supremacist sentiment continuing to galvanise groups and individuals across the West.
Trends
Notwithstanding the continued reduction in violence in the West observed in 2022, three elements of the extreme right remain of concern. First is the ongoing mainstreaming of far right political movements in various Western countries.1 The extent of mainstreaming varies considerably from country to country. In the United States (US), France and Italy, the far right has made notable inroads into the body politic. In others, such as Australia and New Zealand, far right politicians and parties continue to remain on the political fringes.2 While the increase in mainstreaming of the far right could explain lowered extreme right violence overall (though it is far from clear that the violent edges actually see themselves as part of the far right mainstream), it certainly implies greater social and security challenges down the road.
The second development of concern is the ongoing war in Ukraine, which has affected the extreme right globally in unexpected ways. Contrary to preliminary expectations, there have been very few known direct mobilisations by the extreme right to travel to and participate in the Ukraine conflict. As observed, the conflict in Ukraine has not so far evolved to be the extreme right’s equivalent of the Islamic State’s (IS) campaign in Iraq and Syria between 2014-2019 – acting as a magnet for the extreme right to fight, train and gain experience which they could then translate into terrorist attacks back home.
The groups that used to be of major concern – most notably the Azov Battalion militia outfit – are now part of the force that the West is supporting against the Russian invasion. In fact, the more prominent narratives amongst extreme right groups in Western states are that Russia and President Vladimir Putin are the true defenders of Western culture and have a common enemy – namely, the Western liberals.3 Whatever the case, the actual nature of the extreme right terrorist threat that might surface from Ukraine has yet to emerge.
The final major trend is the continuing diffusion of the extreme right threat, both in narrative and physical terms. The US continued to see large-scale mass shootings, some inspired by extreme right-wing narratives. The high-profile October attack on Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband at home in San Francisco also involved an individual motivated by a complex mix of conspiracy-fuelled ideas.4 In Europe, the profile and locations of plots and attacks broadened. An attack outside an LGBTQ+ bar in Bratislava, Slovakia on October 12, 2022 by a teenager who subsequently killed himself, was linked by inspiration to numerous earlier extreme right-wing attacks.5 In Germany, authorities arrested a 74-year-old woman who was accused of being the instigator behind a plot disrupted earlier in the year to murder the country’s health minister.6 In Iceland, police arrested four individuals in what they described as a far right-wing attack plot on the authorities.7 In the United Kingdom (UK), a 66-year-old, anti-immigration activist launched a firebomb attack on a migration centre before killing himself.8 There was little evidence that any of these incidents came from a centrally controlled and directed network.
At the same time, the malleability of extreme right narratives continues to allow it to expand its narrative footprint by absorbing a variety of ideologies into its fold.9 This flexibility in turn allows for an ever-expanding range of adherents to be categorised as being of the extreme right (even though they may be ideologically inconsistent), and continues to make classifying and defining the extreme right a highly challenging task.
Extreme Right in the Late-COVID World
2022 saw a sharp loosening of restrictive COVID-19-related mandates around the world. The preceding two years had seen unprecedented lockdowns and vaccination-differentiated measures, which were unpopular with large parts of the general public in the West and provided fodder for extreme right ideologies.10 From their perspective, the aggressive pandemic-related measures were seen as authoritarian and intrusive, highlighting the overbearing state which they sought to fight back against. At the same time, lockdowns provided individuals on the extreme right (as well as other ideologies) with more time on the internet to propagate COVID-19-related conspiratorial narratives. While such themes are still prevalent in extreme right channels, a few conspiratorial narratives suggest that Western governments have given up on using COVID-19 to control them, interpreting the relaxed COVID-19 mandates as a victory for their movements.11
A broad scan of social media channels on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Telegram and Gab, suggested that COVID-19 no longer constitutes a focus of most messages and posts. Instead, there was a mix of socio-political issues specific to the societies that the extreme right groups are based in, along with commentaries on international issues and topics such as the Ukraine war, climate change and China’s growing geopolitical assertiveness. In other words, it is not clear that COVID-19 has left a lasting imprint on the extreme right-wing in narrative terms. There continued, however, to be some interest in the topic on some parts of the violent edge. In April, authorities in the western German state of Rhineland-Palatinate arrested a group of four which they claimed had been planning a widespread campaign that included abducting the health minister.12 The group called itself the Vereinte Patrioten (United Patriots) and was linked to the Reichsbürger movement in Germany, which follows the same ideology as the Sovereign Citizen movement in other parts of the West.13 They were also identified as prominent anti-COVID-19 activists.14
On the less violent edge, a protest by Canadian truckers at the beginning of 2022 about COVID-19 restrictions escalated into a wider protest,15 and led to imitators in Australia,16 New Zealand,17 France18 and the Netherlands.19 These protests became entrepôts of disaffection with some clear extreme right-wing ideas being brought into the mix. However, it is important to note that the extreme right – while it may have sought to take advantage of the protests – did not appear to be the instigator. These convoys did not lead to any terrorist violence, but they highlighted the depth of anger and frustration that was generated during the pandemic, suggesting a wellspring of anger which may re-emerge. The concern is this might find a home amongst the extreme right-wing groups that also gathered around the protests.
Decline in Violence but Mainstreaming of the Far and Extreme Right in the West
Of continuing concern is the persistent mainstreaming of the far right in major western democracies. Though related, this is of course different from the violent extreme right that forms the focus of the other parts of this assessment. It is worth observing, however, as it creates an environment in which intolerant ideas can be misinterpreted and hostility towards minority communities can be encouraged. The electoral victory in Italy of the hard-right candidate Giorgia Meloni,20 Sweden’s minority government’s dependence on the Swedish Democrats (a far right party) to back the government,21 and the growing normalisation of former President Donald Trump’s wing of the Republican Party as the mainstream in the US, all show how political parties which use narratives that appeal to the far right can gain power.
The exact link between these parties and the violent extreme right is not clear; in fact, some onlinediscussions appear to broadly frame these parties as not being truly committed to the cause of the extreme right.22 Yet the climate of perceived intolerance and social tension that such mainstream parties foster creates an environment conducive to violent interpretation and a polarised discourse where people can believe violence is the only option left to them.
For example, violent opposition to anti-racist movements such as Black Lives Matter continued in 2022. In February 2022, white supremacist Benjamin Smith shot at protesters for racial justice. His internet activity suggested he was anti-Semitic, racist and misogynistic.23 In addition to racism and anti-immigration sentiments, some extreme right attacks have also been partly motivated by ecofascism – a narrative which is a combination of the extreme right trying to tap into the wider conversation about environmentalism and also an appeal to the ‘blood and soil’ narratives which have long motivated extreme right-wing groups. In the May 2022 mass shooting incident in Buffalo, New York which claimed the lives of 10 black people, in addition to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory,24 eco-fascist sentiments also appeared to have been one of the key motivating factors for the shooter.25
This broad diffusion of the far right and extreme violent right, and the confusion to some degree of the line between them, has continued to spill over into the threat picture in other ways. The Mixed Unstable or Unclear (MUU) category of the threat continues to grow – in some cases showing suggestion of some link to the extreme right (often adjacent to other ideologies). Data gathered by the UK’s Prevent programme from recent years (as recent as 2021) suggest the MUU account for around half of all reported cases.26
It is notable that MUU referred cases are also amongst the smallest number to subsequently get adopted as Channel27 (a UK programme which seeks to engage individual cases to help steer them off radicalisation) interventions. This suggests a level of over-referring that highlights how unclear and confusing the terrorist threat is perceived to have become. In the same basket of concerns, the continuing growth in numbers of the very young, those on the autism spectrum, and the mentally ill appearing amongst the case load on the extreme right (as well as other ideologies) also highlights how the highly malleable, intensively online and angry extreme right-wing narratives are able to stir up an ever more confusing mix of potential threats.28
Ukraine War Not a Major Turning Point for the Extreme Right
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was an important event in international politics in 2022, which had a direct relevance to the extreme right in the West. Prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the local extreme right of Ukraine – primarily the Azov Regiment (pro-Ukrainian ultranationalists) – had attracted a number of extreme right-wing activists from across the West to join it.29 There were also some who had gone to fight on the Russian side (with some countries, like Italy, finding people fighting on both sides). After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, the conflict drew some extreme right fighters, especially from neighbouring countries, to join hands with the Ukrainian side.30 The number of fighters making their way to Ukraine to fight has been small due to the Ukrainian government’s vetting processes.31 While exact numbers are not available, the Counter Extremism Project puts the number of foreign fighters who joined both sides to range between “several hundreds to a few thousands”.32 The number of fighters who travelled to fight for Russia is estimated to be less than those who went to fight on the side of Ukraine.
Among those attracted to fight for Ukraine, it is unclear how many actually hold extreme right-wing ideas or are linked to such groups. While some cases do exist, the high mainstream support of the conflict by the West has inspired people to travel to Ukraine to simply fight the Russian “aggression”.33 This kind of narrative has meant the lens through which the conflict is seen is much wider than the extreme right-wing connection prevalent prior to the Russian invasion.
Overall, the current sense is that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has not mobilised the extreme right to the extent expected, though it has influenced Western extreme right narratives. As the war progressed, it increasingly became apparent from extreme right platforms’ discourse that they were leaning in support of Russia and Putin.34 This posture stemmed from seeing Putin as the champion for the rights of the Christian, non-LGBTQ+ and non-minority people; unlike the democratically elected governments of the West, which, in the eyes of the extreme right, are corrupt and actively support the growth of communities undermining the white, Christian populace. This has created an interesting rift between the extreme right and the mainstream party-political far right in a number of contexts. While Russia and Putin are still generally viewed favourably by the extreme right in the West, recent Pew polls suggest marked drops in support for Russia and its leader from among European right-wing populists.35
Nevertheless, the war in Ukraine is worth continuing to observe for a number of reasons. The fact that some individuals associated with the extreme right have gone to fight there is of high concern – their training, experience and access to weapons will make them potentially far more lethal should they return home with dangerous intent. At the same time, the vast volumes of weapons flowing into Ukraine present a huge opportunity for criminal and terrorist networks. Prior to the Russian invasion, in 2016, Ukrainian authorities detained a Frenchman at their border with Poland with a truckload of weapons he had purchased and was reportedly planning on using as part of a terror campaign in France.36
So far, weapons associated with the conflict have not appeared in any plots, but Europol leaders have highlighted it as a potential concern.37 At the same time, Russian authorities have also been keen to highlight the problem, illustrating another way in which the conflict in Ukraine might become intertwined with Europe’s terrorist threat – through Russian disinformation or active support for extreme right-wing groups in Europe as part of an effort to destabilise the continent.38
Diffused Nature of Threat in Europe
A final point concerns the continuing diffusion of the threat in Europe. While the volume of attacks is down, the variety of disruptions (both in terms of offender profiles and locations), their growing cellular organisation and the increasing appearance of new technologies like 3D printers39 amongst their belongings, highlight a problem which is going to be ever harder to manage. 3D printers have now become so common in terror arrests that Europol has held conferences to explore learning from different cases on how to manage the threat.40 Cases of 3D printers being used by extreme right-wing networks in 2022 were found in places as diverse as Slovakia41 and Iceland.42 In the UK, two separate trials linked to the extreme right involving 3D printers concluded in 2022.43
Slovakia also saw a teenager launch an extreme right-wing attack, while an inquest in the UK revealed the death earlier in the year of a teenage girl who had been radicalised and groomed into extreme right-wing ideas.44 In both cases, the teenagers killed themselves, highlighting both the threat and the extreme vulnerability of some youth being drawn towards extreme right-wing ideologies. At the other end of the scale, a cell of middle-aged men disrupted in Germany was reportedly being directed by a 75-year-old teacher; a 66-year-old pensioner was responsible for an attack on a migration centre in the UK; while French authorities arrested a group of four aged between 45-53 in Mulhouse near Strasbourg with an “alarming” volume of weaponry and reported plans to ‘hunt Jews’.45 A July report by the UK’s Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee (which provides oversight of the intelligence community) on the extreme right-wing threat in the country observed that while there seemed to be a growing radicalisation amongst youth on the extreme right, the previous three attacks on record had been done by older men (a roster now increased to four with the Dover migrant centre attacker).46 The point is that the extreme right threat in the European context, in particular, has become increasingly diffused in both profile, targeting and nature.
Outlook
The outlook for the extreme right-wing in the West remains unclear, though the underlying trends point to lurking dangers with a possible transition to a late COVID-19-phase in which the war in Ukraine and the further mainstreaming of the far right in Western democracies play more important roles as narrative generators. While violence is down, it remains hazy as to the exact reasons for this trend. The downward trend suggests a pattern that appears in some temporary abeyance, but the continuing arrests, the vast array of perpetrator profiles and the unceasing inspiration that attackers appear to draw from one another, also suggest that the problem will persist. The interplay between mainstream parties and this extreme edge remains unclear; doubtless, the increasingly polarised public space is continuing to play a significant role in exacerbating problems.
About the Authors
Raffaello Pantucci is a Senior Fellow and Kalicharan Veera Singam is a Senior Analyst at the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research (ICPVTR), a constituent unit of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. They can be reached at israffaello@ntu.edu.sg and isveera@ntu.edu.sg, respectively.
11 This observation was picked up from our monitoring of various right-wing conspiratorial online groups and reiterated in discussions with experts on the Australian and New Zealand far right.
22 This observation was picked up from social media monitoring of right-wing groups, primarily in the Australian and New Zealand contexts. Discussions with observers in European contexts drew similar conclusions.
33 The former British Foreign Secretary (and briefly Prime Minister) Liz Truss went so far as to say she actively supported people who wanted to go and fight alongside the Ukrainians.
38 Earlier examples of this include the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM), which offered training grounds for European XRW, the leadership of The Base being based in St Petersburg, and links between Russia’s Wagner group and parts of the European XRW.
As in the previous three years, Central Asia was free from domestic terrorist attacks in 2022. Nevertheless, the region’s security faced major instability with large-scale violence – for a variety of reasons – in all of the region’s countries except Turkmenistan. At the same time, concerns persisted over the potential for militant activities involving the Islamic State of Khorasan Province (ISK) in Afghanistan to spill over into the region, even as Central Asian militants on the ground have, for the most part, stayed loyal to the Taliban. Likewise, in Syria, most Central Asians continued to fight alongside Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), though their focus remains regional. Similar to recent years, there was also some evidence of additional radicalisation, recruitment and fund-raising both within the region and amongst diaspora communities.
Mass Unrest
The widespread instability witnessed in Central Asia over the past year was not in fact terrorism, but rather a wave of mass unrest across the region. While each instance had its own drivers and cause the net result was a tumultuous year for Central Asia, even as terrorist threats appeared to be focused elsewhere.
2022 started with an unexpected set of clashes in Kazakhstan, where localised demonstrations in the city of Zhanaozen over a steep rise in fuel prices in early January escalated into mass riots across several cities, including the largest one, Almaty. The skirmishes led to the deaths of some 230 people, including 19 members of the security forces.1 Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev described the unrest as a “well-organised and prepared act”, suggesting – without any presented evidence at the time – that the perpetrators also included “foreign militants from Central Asia and Afghanistan as well as the Middle East”.2
In order to restore stability, and reflecting a loss of confidence in his own security forces, President Tokayev was compelled to call upon the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), to deploy just over 2,000 troops to help relieve local forces by guarding critical national infrastructure.3 Kazakh officials suggested that up to 20,000 people arrived in the country to participate in the riots, while police seized more than 2,000 illegal weapons from rioters.4 These statements were, however, disputed by various analysts.5
The more likely cause of the violence appears to have a been a mix of internal political disputes, alongside deep-seated public anger over widespread grievances such as corruption, nepotism and growing economic inequality. President Tokayev appeared to acknowledge much of this in reforms he pushed through subsequently,6 while the arrests of senior figures linked to former President Nursultan Nazarbayev highlighted the fissures exposed by the in-fighting behind some of the violence.7 Tensions linger on in the country through reports of alleged mistreatment of some of those detained during the trouble.8
These events were followed in mid-May by an outbreak of violence in the majority ethnic Pamiri Gorno Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO) in Tajikistan, on the country’s border with Afghanistan. On May 14, hundreds of local residents demonstrated in the region’s capital of Khorog, where the situation had been tense since November 2021, when police fatally injured a local man wanted on charges of kidnapping.9 Protesters demanded the resignation of top provincial authorities over their alleged failure to investigate the local man’s death.
After authorities refused these requests, a large group of local youth marched towards the provincial administration and clashed with security forces, who retaliated by using rubber bullets and tear gas.10 The Tajik Interior Ministry stated that a group of 200 young supporters of Mamadbokir Mamadbokirov, an alleged local criminal who was subsequently killed, conducted an armed assault using guns and firebombs on the ministry’s provincial headquarters.11 The riots and clashes left 29 perpetrators and one police officer dead.12
President Emomali Rahmon later stated that it was a pre-planned event through which “internal and external stakeholders sought to destabilise the situation”, accusing his long-standing bête noire, the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT), of running the armed attacks and spending nearly US$2.5 million to finance the perpetrators.13 The IRPT, which is banned in Tajikistan and Russia as an extremist and terrorist organisation, has denied these allegations.14 Most non-government observers, while acknowledging the possible role of influential, informal local powerbrokers in the outbreak of violence, have also highlighted low living standards, youth unemployment, rising food prices and bad central government-community relations as underlying causes.15 The violence also pulls on a long-standing tension between Pamiri communities and the rest of the country, one of many drivers of the brutal civil war that ravaged the country in the 1990s.
Soon after the violence in GBAO, in Nukus, the capital city of Uzbekistan’s autonomous Karakalpakstan republic, large-scale protests erupted in response to proposed constitutional amendments that would limit the region’s right to secede. The leader of the protests, Dauletmurat Tazhimuratov, a blogger from Nukus, was detained and released promptly.16 However, crowds of people assembled in the city centre announced Tazhimuratov as the new head of the autonomous republic, while demanding the resignation of its actual head, who came to meet and negotiate with the protesters at the scene. When protesters attempted to enter and seize the parliament building, they clashed with the National Guard, leading to violence and deaths. President Shavkat Mirziyoyev responded by revoking the proposed changes, while deploying security forces and declaring a state of emergency.
The clashes led to the reported deaths of 18 and 243 injuries.17 Tazhimuratov was arrested by the police and criminal cases have been opened against him and his accomplices.18 Some of his supporters insisted that he never promoted secession, but found himself used by separatists in their propaganda.19 Local authorities in Nukus have pointed to external responsibility without revealing any further details.20 Nevertheless, in his speech on August 26, President Mirziyoyev underlined unemployment, rising prices, unsatisfactory road conditions, shortage of potable water and disruptions in electricity supply as contributing to public discontent, which local authorities had failed to address effectively despite increased investment by the central government. He also announced additional economic support for the region.21
Clashes at the Kyrgyz-Tajik Border
On September 14, a new round of armed clashes ignited between border guards at the Kyrgyz-Tajik border close to Kyrgyzstan’s Batken province, where periodic provocations and clashes have taken place over the past decade.22 Violence this time around appeared to have erupted due to clashes in the Tajik exclave of Vorukh, which sits entirely surrounded by Kyrgyzstan. The violence rapidly escalated with three-day long clashes involving tanks and armoured personnel carriers, which left 63 dead (including 13 civilians), 144 injured and more than 140,000 evacuated in Kyrgyzstan, and 41 dead and dozens injured in Tajikistan.23 Predictably, both parties blamed each other for the clashes.
Understanding responsibility and blame, however, seems particularly confusing at this time, especially as both leaders were sitting together in Uzbekistan at a Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit when the clashes took place. Whatever the case, one of the most striking aspects of these clashes was Kyrgyzstan’s top security official’s insistence that they had proof that “terrorist mercenaries” fought on the side of Tajikistan forces, and officials in Kabul recognised their citizens.24 No more information was provided, and the Tajik side has rejected the claim as propaganda. While both sides have since agreed to demilitarise conflict areas along the border, the clashes highlighted the fragility of border relations between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, with the bout of violence a repeat of events in 2021, though with a higher casualty count.25
More broadly, while local political in-fighting might have fuelled much of the violence and instability witnessed in the region, these are also feeding off a widespread sense of public discontent. This in turn highlights a major issue that authorities across the region are clearly struggling to handle, one which poses a potential danger in the future.
Militant Groups in Afghanistan and Syria
The Taliban’s violent takeover of Kabul in August 2021 continued to cast uncertainty on Afghanistan from a Central Asian perspective. While all of the region’s countries that share a border with Taliban ruled Afghanistan share a concern about the overspill of violence, they have – with the notable exception of Tajikistan – chosen to embrace the Taliban authorities in an attempt to bring stability to Afghanistan.
In seeking international recognition, the Taliban have repeatedly insisted that Afghanistan under their rule will be a responsible state that would not allow any terrorist group to use their territory to launch attacks against others. However, these claims are belied by action on the ground (like the revelation that slain Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was resident in Kabul) as well as the ISK’s repeated references to Central Asia as a target in its propaganda and attempted attacks. This is a source of concern across Central Asia.
On October 19, Ramazon Rahimov, Tajikistan’s Minister of Interior, claimed that the Taliban had issued Afghan passports to more than 3,000 members of terrorist groups, including some Central Asians.26 He did not provide any details to substantiate his claim.27 Another top Tajik general assessed the situation in the north-eastern Afghan provinces that share common borders with Tajikistan – especially in Badakhshan, Takhar and Balkh – to be “complicated and tense”.28
He noted that it might further deteriorate in the near term as Al-Qaeda (AQ), the Islamic State (IS) and other terror groups continue to operate about 40 training camps and bases, with large numbers of light and heavy weapons, military hardware and even drones obtained as trophies from the toppled Afghan forces. He also revealed there were about 5,000 militants originating from former Soviet countries in the ranks of groups affiliated to AQ, the Taliban and IS in Afghanistan, without breaking down the figure by each group.
Currently, four Central Asian militant units, namely the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU or IJG), the Afghanistan wing of Katibat Imam Al-Bukhari (KIB), the Jamaat Ansarullah, and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), are known to operate in Afghanistan under the protection and guidance of the Taliban. Since the Taliban prohibited foreign terrorist groups under its control from active online visibility in 2020, production and propagation of extremist propaganda in the online public domain by such groups has shrunk. The latest updates on these groups mostly come from official reports filtered through the United Nations (UN).
According to UN reporting, the Taliban takeover has granted these Central Asian groups greater freedom of movement inside Afghanistan, with several key terrorist figures recently showing up openly in Kabul.29 IJU, led by Ilimbek Mamatov, a Kyrgyz national who is also known as Khamidulla, and the group’s second-in-command, Amsattor Atabaev from Tajikistan, is active primarily in the northern provinces of Badakhshan, Baghlan and Kunduz. IJU reportedly has the strongest military preparedness among Central Asian groups fighting in Afghanistan.
KIB’s Afghan wing, led by Dilshod Dekhanov, a Tajik national who is also known as Jumaboi, operates mainly in Badghis province.30 The group has reportedly boosted its fighting force by recruiting several local Afghans. In September, Mamatov and Dekhanov visited Kabul on separate occasions, asking for the Taliban’s approval and assistance to unify Central Asian groups under their respective leadership. Taliban officials denied this request, pushing instead to make the groups part of the newly developed Taliban army. While the exact reasons and the pretext given by the two leaders for the proposed unification were unclear, they were competing to consolidate control over some Central Asian militant groups. It might also show the Taliban’s willingness to increase the size of its armed forces.
Jamaat Ansarullah, led by Sajod (the son of Amriddin Tabarov, alias Domullo Amriddin, the group’s notorious founding leader from Tajikistan who was killed in 2016 in Afghanistan), retains close ties with the Taliban and AQ. The group is also known in Afghanistan as the “Tajik Taliban”, as it unites about 300 militants in its ranks, predominantly Tajik nationals and some Afghan Tajiks. Since September 2021, Jamaat Ansarullah has assisted the Taliban force in administering some districts in Badakhshan and Kunduz, and in guarding sections of the common border with Tajikistan.31
In July, reports emerged that the leader of the group, Mohammed Sharipov, also known as Mehdi Arsalan, had broken away from Jamaat Ansarullah to create a new group called Tehreek-e-Taliban Tajikistan (TTT). However, since this declaration, there has been little change in the militants’ activities. The group appears to continue to operate alongside the Taliban in the north of Afghanistan, and the logic of re-naming itself seems unclear. It bears attention, however, as it could ultimately develop into a wider split from the Taliban, particularly given the tensions that have been visible between the Taliban and their Central Asian origin or ethnic cadres over the past year.32
ISK Boosts Propaganda Threats Against Central Asia
This tension was something noticed by the Islamic State’s branch in Afghanistan, with the ISK throughout 2022 intensifying its propaganda campaigns against Central Asian governments. Though the group’s capability remains debatable, their interest in Central Asia is strong, and they made three failed attempts to target the region with rockets fired across the border in 2022. Reports on the first case appeared on April 19 when ISK and its networks claimed to have hit a military camp in the southern Uzbek city of Termiz.33 Authorities in Uzbekistan denied the claim, though large deployments of the Uzbek military were seen in the region. The Taliban later confirmed, without providing evidence, that ISK members had fired rockets from inside Afghanistan towards Uzbekistan, but they did not reach the Uzbek border and the perpetrators were captured.
On May 7, more rockets were launched from Afghanistan’s Takhar province into the neighbouring Panj district in Tajikistan. ISK claimed responsibility for the incident, which Tajik authorities dismissed as “bullets [that] accidentally ended up on the territory of Tajikistan” after a shootout between Taliban and ISK forces near the shared border.34 Later on July 7, five dud rockets fired from Afghanistan landed in Uzbekistan’s border town of Termez, causing no injuries but slightly damaging four houses and a football stadium.35 Soon after, the Taliban announced the killing of three and the arrest of four ISK militants in Kunduz, whom it suspected of conducting the last two rocket attacks.36
Although these attacks were an operational failure for ISK, they generated attention and served as a morale booster for the group, while undermining the credibility of the Taliban. ISK had also expanded the production, reproduction and propagation of propaganda in Uzbek, Tajik and Kyrgyz languages through its media teams, such as Al-Azaim Foundation and Xuroson Ovozi.37 Yet this noise has not resulted in an increased threat, with some analysts suggesting the terrorist group might be in decline.38
In this respect, and notwithstanding all the attention directed towards Central Asia in their publications, ISK has yet to hit any targets (outside the failed cross-border rocket attacks and a very lightly sourced report of an attempt to target the Turkmenistan Embassy in Kabul in late August 2021).39 The attack on the Russian Embassy by ISK in September, however, also highlighted the group’s ability to strike its desired targets.40 The recent revelations that the shooter in an ISK-claimed attack at a shrine in Shiraz, Iran, was a Tajik national also underscored how ISK’s Central Asian cadres are regionally mobile.41 All this raises further questions as to why the group has not yet followed through on its Central Asian rhetoric.
HTS-Linked Groups and Individuals
In Syria, AQ-linked Central Asian combat units, such as Katibat al-Tawhid wal Jihad (KTJ) and KIB’s central core, have remained active primarily in north-western Idlib province. As in previous years, both KTJ and KIB are part of the jihadist alliance under Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), itself an evolution of AQ’s former representative on the Syrian battlefield. KTJ, led by Ilmurad Hikmatov (alias Abdul Aziz) and his deputy Akhliddin Novkatiy (Navqotiy), is assessed to have been relatively weakened by the quarrel that broke out between Hikmatov and former KTJ leader and key ideologue, Abu Saloh, after the latter’s defection to Jabhat Ansar al-Din (JAD) in June 2020.42
On September 11, Russia’s Defence Ministry reported that its air forces had killed Abu Saloh, whose real name was Sirajuddin Mukhtarov, along with several top HTS members in an airstrike in Syria.43 If confirmed, his removal would be a major blow to the group, which has been accused by the US State Department of being linked to both the 2016 attack on the Chinese Embassy in Bishkek and the 2017 Metro attack in St Petersburg.44 The group’s future trajectory remains unclear, even with the emergence of Navqotiy as its chief ideologue.45 His recent propaganda narratives have centred on the importance and legitimacy of conducting armed jihad in Syria.
KIB is led by Ramazan Nurmanov, a Tajik national whose father was reportedly a veteran jihadist militant who gained fighting experience in Afghanistan and Syria. KIB has kept its 2016 public pledge of allegiance to the Taliban, possibly facilitated by the key group leaders’ fighting background and networking in Afghanistan. Currently, KIB has a force strength of 110 fighters who operate mainly in north-western Latakia province. Online videos and photos released by KIB and KTJ indicate that both groups have played an active role in HTS-led operations against the Syrian Armed Forces and rival terrorist groups in Idlib and Latakia, and lately against the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) in Afrin in October.
Besides the two groups, there are some notorious individuals, such as Farrukh Fayzimatov, who are affiliated to HTS. As discussed in the 2021 annual report, Fayzimatov is an Idlib-based Tajik militant who goes by the nom de guerre Faruq Shami, and who allegedly had links to the perpetrator of the October 2020 Paris attack on the schoolteacher Samuel Paty. While presenting himself as an “independent blogger-reporter”, Fayzimatov in 2022 continued to produce and circulate videos in the online domain, including blogging sites, YouTube and Twitter. However, unlike in the past, recent materials did not contain words like “jihad” or scenes of fighting and training.46
Although both KTJ and KIB have confined their operational activities within Syria, they have increased online efforts to reach out to potential sympathisers, including various diaspora communities. Throughout the year, officials in both Central Asia and Russia reported arrests of suspected members or supporters of regional groups (KTJ and KIB in particular). It is difficult, however, to appreciate the nature of these links in some cases due to the paucity of publicly available information. For example, in late August, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) claimed to have detained a Central Asian whom they stated had been radicalised in Turkey to travel to India via Moscow. The individual had planned to launch a punitive attack on IS’ behalf in response to alleged inflammatory comments made on Indian television by Nupur Sharma, a former spokesperson for India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).47 Since then, nothing more has been heard about the case.
Responses
There were no major changes in the region’s responses to terrorist threats in 2022, with most authorities continuing existing policies. The biggest source of radicalisation appears to be the experience of labour migration in Russia, which continues to account for the largest portion of radicalised individuals of Central Asian origin. In the first half of the year, Uzbekistan repatriated 59 nationals who were detained abroad, including in Russia, for their alleged links to militant groups.48 Over the same period, the country disrupted several online (particularly on Telegram) recruitment and fund-raising cells linked to groups such as IS and KTJ, leading to the detention of 250 radical suspects.49
At the same time, events in Afghanistan continued to pose a major concern for security forces across the region, as highlighted above. In response, all of the region’s countries – except Tajikistan – have chosen to embrace and work closely with the Taliban authorities on the assumption that this offers the best hope for stability. And even in Tajikistan, the government has chosen to resume some border trading, suggesting they see a path of engagement as a possibility on specific issues.
The path of engagement has also faced issues – the repeated (if failed) ISK cross-border strikes into Uzbekistan caused major frictions between Kabul and Tashkent. Some in the region worry about what precedent might be set if the Taliban successfully builds an Islamic Emirate on the borders of secular Muslim-majority Central Asia. Local observers point to growing levels of public, outward religious expression, alongside larger societal tensions illustrated by the mass unrest highlighted at the beginning of this article.
There has been a growing volume of discussion by external partners about supporting counter terrorism efforts in the region, with a particular focus on Afghanistan. This has included a growing volume of visits and attention by the United States (US) to strengthen its ‘overwatch’ capability of Afghanistan from the region. In the case of Tajikistan, it is notable the degree to which the government attracted considerable external support from competing powers. The country received and hosted an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) support from Iran, China and the US, while the Russian military base there has remained, though the number of soldiers present has been depleted following their redeployment to Ukraine. This broader pattern of activity is worth keeping in view given its potential to become a focus for great power tensions and conflict.
Beyond this, the Tajik government repatriated another 146 women and children from camps in Syria.50 While exact numbers of Central Asians left in the camps in Syria remain unclear, it appears that Kyrgyzstan might undertake another repatriation exercise of children from the camps soon.51 There have currently been no reports of recidivism amongst the Central Asians who have returned, though it is unclear exactly what has happened in all cases.52
Finally, it is hard to gauge the practical impact of the decision by the US State Department to add KTJ to its list of proscribed terrorist organisations.53 However, it was notable that they chose to highlight the group’s responsibility for the 2017 St Petersburg attack and the 2016 attack on the Chinese Embassy in Bishkek. The 2016 attack, for example, had previously been linked to Uyghur networks with links to Syria, though it is possible these might have had links to KTJ as well. Washington’s decision to specifically highlight the attacks on China and Russia came as relations between Washington, Beijing and Moscow continued to become more tense, suggesting a possible attempt by the US government to highlight possible counter terrorism cooperation with their otherwise adversaries. This might be an attempt by the Biden administration to counter the damage done by the previous Trump administration’s decision to de-list the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM).54
Outlook
In sum, Central Asia continues to have many strands of radicalisation threatening regional security, despite the absence of attacks at home. This might be due to a highly effective local security apparatus, or a threat which has yet to materialise. Certainly, events in Afghanistan remain a concern on several fronts, and the instability seen across the region since the beginning of the year suggests high levels of disenfranchisement from which extremist groups might be able to profit, unless the authorities develop more effective mechanisms to address the socioeconomic and other grievances fuelling these tensions. This, atop the continuing war in Ukraine which is resonating across the former Soviet space, suggests a bumpy year ahead for Central Asia.
About the Authors
Nodirbek Soliev is a Senior Analyst and Raffaello Pantucci is a Senior Fellow at the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research (ICPVTR), a constituent unit of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. They can be reached at isnsoliev@ntu.edu.sg and israffaello@ntu.edu.sg, respectively.
1 Anastasiya Lejepekova, “V Kazakhstane vo Vremya Yanvarskikh Besporyadkov Pogibli 230 Chelovek [230 People Were Killed in Kazakhstan During January Riots],” Gazeta.ru, March 14, 2022, https://www.gazeta.ru/social/news/2022/03/14/17421187.shtml.
2 “V Agressii Protiv Kazakhstana Uchastvovali Inostrannyye Boyeviki, Zayavil Tokayev [Foreign Fighters Participated in the Aggression Against Kazakhstan, Tokayev Said],” RIA Novosti, January 10, 2022, https://ria.ru/20220110/boeviki-1767209576.html.
3 The CSTO is a regional military alliance of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan.
14 “Emomali Rakhmon o Sobytiyakh v GBAO: ‘Drugogo Vykhoda ne Bylo’ [Emomali Rahmon on the Events in GBAO: ‘There Was No Other Way Out’],” Radio Ozodi, June 19, 2022, https://rus.ozodi.org/a/31905149.html.
17 “Chislo Zhertv Besporyadkov v Karakalpakstane Vozroslo do 21 [The Number of Victims of Riots in Karakalpakstan Rose to 21],” Interfax, July 18, 2022, https://www.interfax.ru/world/852703.
20 Jokargy Kenes of the Republic of Karakalpakstan, K Sobytiyam v Karakalpakstane [On the Events in Karakalpakstan], July 2, 2022, https://joqargikenes.uz/ru/11171.html.
22 Over the past 10 years, more than 150 clashes took place between the Kyrgyz and Tajik communities and border guards over the disputed ownership of undefined territories, cross-border water streams and roads, as well as illegal crossings and livestock grazing. Before the September events, there had been at least three major outbreaks in 2022 – in January, March and June. Nazir Aliyev, “Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan Border Disputes Continue for 31 years,” September 17, 2022, Anadolu Agency, https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/kyrgyzstan-tajikistan-border-disputescontinue-for-31-years/2687807#.
24 No further details were provided, though numerous officials on the ground in Central Asia report having seen a video which showed heavily bearded men saying ‘Allahu Akhbar’ and claiming to be jihadist warriors fighting on the Tajik side. “Marat Imankulov: V Boyevykh Deystviyakh na Storone RT Uchastvovali Afganskiye Nayemniki [Marat Imankulov: Afghan Mercenaries Participated in the Fighting on the Side of the Republic of Tatarstan],” 24KG, September 19, 2022, https://24.kg/vlast/245647_marat_imankulov_vboevyih_deystviyah_nastoronert_uchastvovali_afganskie_naemniki/.
25 A long-term solution to the tensions will require mutually agreed border delimitation and demarcation, although the process is complicated due to long-standing geographical and demographic complexities, and disputes over territorial and resources ownership.
27 The logic from a Taliban perspective would be to both reward them for their support and gain loyalty from the Central Asian fighters, while also strengthening the Taliban narrative of no ‘foreigners’ operating from their territory.
28 “Pogransluzhba Tadzhikistana: U Terroristov v Afganistane Yest’ Mnogo Oruzhiya i BPLA [Border Service of Tajikistan: Terrorists in Afghanistan Have a Lot of Weapons and UAVs],” TASS, October 19, 2022, https://tass.ru/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/16095199.
29 United Nations Security Council, Letter Dated 3 February 2022 from the Chair of the Security Council Committee Pursuant to Resolutions 1267 (1999), 1989 (2011) and 2253 (2015) Concerning Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Dae’esh), Al-Qaida and Associated Individuals, Groups, Undertakings and Entities Addressed to the President of the Security Council, S/2022/83, February 3, 2022, p. 16, https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/3957081?ln=en.
30 Ibid.
31 United Nations Security Council, Letter Dated 25 May 2022 from the Chair of the Security Council Committee Established Pursuant to Resolution 1988 (2011) Addressed to the President of the Security Council, S/2022/419, May 26, 2022, p. 21, https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/3975071?ln=en.
32 Earlier in January 2022, the Taliban arrested an Uzbek commander named Makhdom Alim, who was reportedly involved in local criminality, in Faryab. His detention led to clashes and widespread protests amongst local Uzbeks, which in turn led to a Taliban crackdown in the region. It was ultimately not clear whether ethnicity played any role in his detention (Alim was reportedly moved to serve a different security role in Ghazni). See Ehsanullah Amiri and Saeed Shah, “Afghanistan’s Taliban Battle Rebellion by Ethnic Minority Fighters,” The Wall Street Journal, January 14, 2022, https://www.wsj.com/articles/afghanistans-taliban-battle-rebellion-by-ethnic-minority-fighters-11642197509; “Taliban Replaces Its Acting Education Minister in Reshuffle,” Amu TV, September 21, 2022.
35 “Na Territoriyu Uzbekistana Upali Pyat Snaryadov Predpolozhitel no so Storony Afganistana [Five Shells Allegedly from Afghanistan Fell on the Territory of Uzbekistan],” Gazeta.uz, July 5, 2022, https://www.gazeta.uz/uz/2022/08/19/termez/.
42 UNSC, Letter Dated 3 February 2022 from the Chair of the Security Council Committee Pursuant to Resolutions 1267 (1999), 1989 (2011) and 2253 (2015) Concerning Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Dae’esh), Al-Qaida and Associated Individuals, Groups, Undertakings and Entities Addressed to the President of the Security Council.
45 Currently, several public accounts on YouTube carry propaganda videos featuring Navqotiy, with the number of subscribers ranging from several dozens to hundreds, while a page attributed to him on Instagram has nearly 4,500 followers.
46 For instance, in a disclaimer on Twitter, where he has more than 10,000 followers, Fayzimatov claimed that his postings are for “informational purposes only” and “do no promote violence or terrorist organisations”. After the US Treasury Department blacklisted him in 2021 for his connections with HTS, Fayzimatov appears to have taken a more cautious approach in the online domain in an apparent attempt to present himself more positively.
49 In July, Tajik authorities also announced it had registered 720 criminal cases related to terrorist and extremist activity in the first half of 2022, a slight increase over the same period in the year prior. See “General’nyy Prokuror Zayavil o Pugayushchey Tendentsii v Tadzhikistane [The Prosecutor General Announced a Frightening Trend in Tajikistan], Sputnik News, July 15, 2022, https://tj.sputniknews.ru/20220715/tajikistan-terrorizm-ekstrimizm-rost1050026384.html.
51 “Mothers With Children Will Be Repatriated to Kyrgyzstan from Northern Syria,” AKIpress News Agency, October 30, 2022, https://akipress.com/news:684263.
Raffaello Pantucci 