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| Image: Flickr User - Karl-Ludwig Poggemann |
By Casey Michel
ISIS is recruiting around the world, but Russian rhetoric boosts the threat of ISIS to the region beyond reality.
The past year has seen wild swings in economic prognoses, hydrocarbon futures, and security realities throughout Russia and Central Asia. There seems to have been one constant, though: Russian officials hyper-inflating the threat of ISIS (also known as Islamic State) to Central Asian states. The head of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) helped kick off the fear-mongering just over a year ago, describing an “attempt to create some sort of underground extremist state” in Central Asia. Ever since, Russian appraisals of ISIS’s regional threat – from higher-ups to think tanks tied to the Kremlin – have been nearly uniformly overblown.
To be sure, Russian officials are not the lone voices blustering ISIS’s potential threat beyond recognition – regional leaders, and certain Western voices, have contributed to the threat-inflation. And all appearances indicate that ISIS has continued its regional recruitment, especially among itinerant migrant populations working in Russia. But the underground states, the rolling waves of Islamist invaders – these claims would appear to stand far more as a figment of imagination than a reality on the ground.
Nonetheless, Russian officials, and those tied to official Kremlin organs, appear to be sticking to the rhetoric 12 months on. To wit, earlier this month Vasily Kashin, of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST), told The Daily Beast that Central Asia is currently at a “high risk of ISIS blowing up one more front.” Kashin – whose CAST works closely with the Russian defense ministry – didn’t cite any evidence or information backing up his claims of the “high risk,” but moved directly on to the peril of a region-wide war ISIS could somehow spur. “If a large-scale war begins in Central Asia, Russia would definitely have to get involved. In the best scenario, that would be together with China, and in the worst alone; so Putin means to say that he would much rather crush ISIS in Syria by pumping up Assad’s and Iraq’s armies with weapons, than to have a massive war in Central Asia.”
Read the full story at The Diplomat