NPR’s Pien Huang speaks to Ashley Jackson, co-director of the Center on Armed Groups, about the role of Islamic State affiliate groups on the recent foiled attacks on a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna.
PIEN HUANG, HOST:
Three Taylor Swift concerts were canceled in Austria this week after authorities foiled planned attacks on the venue. Three teenagers are now in custody, and at least two of them recently pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and to one affiliate in particular, ISIS-K. Islamic State-related groups have been tied to this and other similar attacks in Europe. More than 140 people were killed in an attack on a Moscow concert hall earlier this year, and an explosion at an Ariana Grande concert in 2017 killed 22 people and injured more than a thousand.
Ashley Jackson is the co-director of the Center on Armed Groups. That’s a nonprofit that researches armed conflict. She and her colleagues have done extensive research on ISIS-K. When we spoke, she told me that the Islamic State of today is a shadow of what it once was, when it once held huge swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria. Now it exists as a loose network, largely online. That’s tough to track, and that’s a big part of its danger.
ASHLEY JACKSON: What it lacks in territory – because it has almost none right now – it’s invested in these online networks and kind of what they call inspiring these kinds of attacks. And that’s an important distinction to make. It’s this kind of nebulous, shadowy propaganda-based idea that still has the potential to do a lot of damage.
HUANG: So among this shadowy network of groups related to the Islamic State that have kind of come up recently, there’s one that stands out in particular, ISIS-K, and it’s been related to, you know, this recent planned attack in Europe and a few others. I’m wondering, can you explain the difference between ISIS-K and maybe the ISIS that we might be more familiar with from news events in the Middle East? What makes this group distinct?
JACKSON: I can try. But short answer is really no one knows, and there’s a lot of confusion. Islamic State Khorasan Province sort of refers to this group in Afghanistan which came to sort of the zenith of its power in 2016. It captured a swathe of Eastern Afghanistan. U.S. forces and the Taliban at the same time fought back the Islamic State.
Now, since the Taliban takeover in 2021 in Afghanistan, Islamic State Khorasan Province really has degraded its capacity to hold territories nonexistent in Afghanistan. But again, it lives online. Its online propaganda, its online presence is much more powerful, and it kind of magnifies this presence.
On top of that, there’s concerns that there’s a branch of Islamic State Khorasan Province that’s active, you know, in Central Asia and in the region or that there are somehow linkages. But to be honest, this is, I think, one of the scarier things – is we don’t really understand these linkages.
What’s really important to do in the situation is to be humble and to really say that we don’t know very much, and we don’t know as much as we should about how these operations are orchestrated and where they’re coming from. But we do know that they’re probably not coming from Afghanistan at this point.
HUANG: So a lot of it exists online. You know, but on either end, there are real people involved, and through your work, you’ve actually interviewed many members of ISIS-K. I’m wondering what they tell you about their ambitions and what they want.
JACKSON: So my Afghan colleagues are really to credit here. They’re the brave and brilliant ones who’ve done the work of interviewing Islamic State fighters inside Afghanistan. And inside Afghanistan, it’s a similar story as to where you’d find Islamic State fighters and recruits elsewhere. It’s individuals who are disillusioned with the ruling party – in this case, the Taliban. They want a more extreme version of Islam. The heyday of the Islamic State and Syria and Iraq represents something to them. It represents this dream of a pure, radically violent Islamic State that I think attracts people both inside Afghanistan and indeed abroad.
HUANG: And so that’s what they want in the region. Then why are they attacking European countries and big public events like concerts?
JACKSON: So I think what we see when groups like Islamic State lose capacity, territory power – they grab for headlines. They grab for attention, right? Targets in Europe is what will make them relevant. So how do you strike, you know, fear into the hearts of your enemy, which, in their eyes, is Europe and the kind of countries of the West? Well, you attack the symbols of what they hold dear. And in that case – you know, in this case, it is a Taylor Swift concert. What could possibly grab more headlines than that?
HUANG: So Austrian authorities say that the main suspect was radicalized online. This was someone who was born and raised in Austria. What do we know about the group’s recruitment methods and how they’re reaching out to people, you know, in other countries and other parts of the world?
JACKSON: So the Islamic State has always from, you know, its early days, had a really sophisticated propaganda machine of online outreach. And it’s what they call kind of inspiration, right? It’s inspiring these individuals to come together and to orchestrate and plan attacks.
And a lot of the attacks we see are so scary because they don’t require a lot of technical know-how, right? They are these sort of self-started, small groups of people who are receiving some sort of instruction – I don’t know in this case, but I think it’s probably very likely – and then going and attempting to do something themselves, right? It’s a very do-it-yourself kind of model of doing things because they don’t have the resources. They don’t have what they once had. But it’s incredibly, incredibly effective.
HUANG: Where do you see ISIS and affiliate groups like ISIS-K, you know, going in the near future? I mean, you’ve described this evolution from, you know, this big organization to sort of this shadowy network. And I’m wondering, you know, how is it trending now? Is their influence and power increasing or decreasing at the moment? What do you see?
JACKSON: I think, you know, the Islamic State is very weak. I mean, there are U.N. reports suggesting it’s getting stronger. We need to get better at understanding how the group works, to be perfectly frank, and understanding which part of the groups have more capacity, more money.
And I think what we’re seeing is, you know, this coalition that really defeated the Islamic state in Syria and Iraq – it doesn’t really exist in the same way anymore. We don’t have a grip on the Islamic State’s reach. And because we don’t have that grip, we don’t have, you know, the same robust international coalition who’s taking the problem seriously and coming up with a coordinated set of measures at the global and national level.
And, you know, I think there are people working on this and addressing it. But it’s that kind of multilayered approach which is really required at this point to ensure that it doesn’t see this resurgence that a lot of people fear.
HUANG: That’s Ashley Jackson, co-director of the Center on Armed Groups. Thank you, Ashley.
JACKSON: Thank you.
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