The group that claimed credit for the deadly terrorist attack in Moscow on Friday is the Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan called Islamic State Khorasan Province, or ISIS-K. “ISIS-K has been fixated on Russia for the past two years” and frequently criticises President Vladimir Putin in its propaganda, said Colin Clarke, a counterterrorism analyst at the Soufan Group, a security consulting firm based in New York.
This frame from a video shows a Taliban fighter standing guard outside the site of a bomb explosion inside a mosque in Mazar-i-Sharif province.“ISIS-K accuses the Kremlin of having Muslim blood in its hands, referencing Moscow’s interventions in Afghanistan, Chechnya andISIS-K was founded in 2015 by disaffected members of the Pakistani Taliban, who then embraced a more violent version of Islam. The group saw its ranks cut roughly in half, to about 1500 to 2000 fighters, by 2021 from a combination of US airstrikes and Afghan commando raids that killed many of its leader