While moribund in Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State (IS) group poses a real threat to Russia’s World Cup that must be taken seriously, security experts warn. Alarm bells have been ringing since disturbing photo-montages began to appear on social media late last year, the work of the IS propaganda arm known as the Wafa Media Foundation.
Crude and explicit, they showed superstars such as Lionel Messi and Neymar dressed in the frighteningly familiar orange suits used for videotaped executions. Lying on the ground, with knives up against their throats or dying in flames, the message accompanying them was blunt.
“You will not enjoy security until we live it in Muslim countries,” the posts said.
Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Troy Souza, authors of a report published last month by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) on the dangers IS poses to the June 14 to July 15 World Cup, said the propaganda campaign unfurled by IS was “unprecedented”.
“In just the past few years, there have been numerous successful terror attacks or thwarted plots in Russia by terrorists linked to or inspired by the Islamic state,” they wrote.
“This suggests the group may have the capacity to launch attacks in Russia during the World Cup.” – Lone wolves –
These attacks, said the US experts, can be either carried out by “lone wolves” — assailants who act on their own after being inculcated by IS propaganda — or by local jihadists.
The latter include Russians and people from Chechnya and the rest of the Caucasus and central Asia, two regions with established links to IS stretching back for over a decade.
They mostly comprise fighters who had recently returned from Syria and Iraq after winding down their campaign to create an ephemeral Islamic “caliphate” in the Middle East.
Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that around 8,500 jihadists from Russia and the former Soviet central Asia have joined the ranks of IS and other jihadist groups in the region.
The exact number of those who have managed to slip through anti-terror services’ hands and safely return to their homelands is unclear.
But experts are certain that prior to its territorial rout, IS instructed some of its fighters to go back and form sleeper cells that could be called upon when needed — such as during a World Cup. Even if Russia had not intervened in Syria on President Bashar al-Assad’s behalf, the world’s most watched event would still have been a target of jihadists, said Pascal Boniface, director of the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs, who specialises in geopolitics and football.