Kazakh connection in French
killings By Jacob Zenn
Within hours of Mohammed Merah's death in
Toulouse, France, on March 22, the Jund al-Khilafa
(JaK) issued a statement claiming responsibility
for Merah's killing spree in which four French
Jews and three French paratroopers of North
African descent were murdered in a 12-day period.
This was the first sign of the JaK's existence in
2012. More than four months had transpired without
any JaK attacks or claims of attacks.
The
statement after Merah's death was originally
posted on the Shmukh al-Islam online jihadi forum
and then taken down. Later, the statement was
reposted on the Ansar al-Mujahideen online jihadi
forum, where it stayed. Unlike all previous JaK
statements that focus on the situation in
Kazakhstan, this statement justified
Merah's attacks based on
events outside of Kazakhstan.
The JaK
statement said:
We hereby claim responsibility for
these blessed operations, and we say that what
Israel is committing of crimes against our
people on the blessed land of Palestine, and in
Gaza specifically, will not pass without
punishment. The mujahideen everywhere intend on
avenging every drop of blood that was unjustly
and aggressively shed in Palestine, Afghanistan
and other Muslim homelands ... we avenge the
honors of the free ones, our sisters who are
sitting in the prisons of the Jews and in
European countries ... We hereby call upon the
French government to relook into its policies
toward the Muslims in the world, and to
surrender its aggressive discrimination toward
Islam and its sharia [law], because such
policy will only bring it calamities and
destruction ... As for the Jews, we tell them
... Our date with you is near, and you will be
stunned by what you will find from us, Allah
willing.
The content of the statement
shows that the JaK may now have decided to fight
for international causes instead of causes in
Kazakhstan. There are several reasons why this may
have occurred.
First, the JaK has not
carried out an attack in Kazakhstan since November
2011. One of its cells in Boraldai village outside
of Almaty was broken up on December 3, 2011. The
leader of the cell, Yerik Ayazbayev, who managed
to escape from Boraldai village, was finally
killed in Kyzlorda on December 29. It is unclear
whether the JaK has any more cells in operation in
Kazakhstan. The attacks the JaK carried out in the
second half of 2011 may have maximized all of its
operational cells within the country.
After the Uzbek government clamped down on
any semblance of Islamic militancy in Uzbekistan,
the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) began
focusing on Afghanistan and Pakistan and, in
recent years, Europe. The same may have occurred
with the JaK after the Kazakh government redoubled
its counter-terrorism efforts following the JaK's
September to December run of attacks in 2011.
Second, in the first two videos that the
JaK released in September and October 2011 it
claimed to be operating with the Taliban in Khost
to fight American forces in Afghanistan. Khost is
a region along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border
where the Taliban and senior members of the IMU
operate. The JaK may have been co-opted by
international jihadis in the area, including the
IMU, and begun to prioritize international jihad
before jihad in Kazakhstan.
Third, the JaK
may be seeking funding from international jihadis
who are attracted to terrorist groups with
international ambitions and that can strike
internationally, as opposed to only in Kazakhstan,
a country that stands at the international jihadi
periphery.
The JaK's claim may help it
receive more funding, whether or not it actually
trained Merah. The JaK statements were written in
Arabic rather than Russian or Kazakh, which people
in Kazakhstan understand could also be intended to
appeal to wealthy funders in the Arab world.
Finally, JaK fighters may have come in
contact with Merah during his time in the
Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. The IMU has
been known to assist al-Qaeda in training European
Muslim jihadis in Afghanistan and Pakistan and
then sending them to Europe to become operational.
Given the IMU's and the JaK's Central
Asian origins and similar goals, they may be
working together. The JaK's statement referred to
Merah as Yousuf al-Faransi (the Frenchman), a
nom de guerre the JaK may have given him
during training. Merah had more than 20 hours
during the standoff with French police to name his
affiliation with the JaK, but he did not. If such
a connection did exist, Merah may have interpreted
all groups training him in Afghanistan-Pakistan to
be al-Qaeda, while the JaK may have seen Merah as
one of its own.
Although the JaK's claim
of an attack in France is completely unexpected
for a group that was previously focused on
Kazakhstan, it is unclear why any other group
would falsely make a claim such as the JaK's. The
Ansar al-Mujahideen forum ultimately accepted the
JaK's posting after the Shmukh al-Islam forum
rejected it. This could indicate that the
administrators of Ansar al-Mujahideen concluded
that the statement was legitimate, despite
ambivalence among the community of online jihadi
administrators.
One consistency with
previous JaK statements is that the JaK statement
about Merah seems to emphasize France's
"burqa ban", which is notorious in the
Islamic world, when it says, "We hereby call upon
the French government to ... surrender its
aggressive discrimination toward Islam and its
sharia." In another Russian-language video
that the JaK released on October 26, 2011, five
days prior to a botched October 31 bombing in
Atyrau, the JaK threatened to "make a move"
against the [Kazakh] government if the government
"insisted on its position" with regards to laws
forbidding prayer in public institutions and the
wearing of headscarves.
Another
consistency between the statement about Merah and
prior JaK statements is the speed between the
attack and the statement. While some jihadi groups
take months to issue a claim of responsibility for
an attack, the JaK has usually done so within one
week of its attacks.
For example, Maksat
Kariyev, a former expert rifleman in the Kazakh
army, went on a two-hour drug-induced murderous
rampage in Taraz, eastern Kazakhstan, on November
12 killing five security officers, one gun-shop
guard, and himself in a suicide explosion that
took out one police commander.
The JaK
issued a statement on the Ansar al-Mujahideen
forum praising Kariyev's "martyrdom" four days
after the attack. Another JaK statement was issued
three days after the Boraldai village shootout,
when the group said, "We are ready to be killed in
the thousands in order to support [Islam], and
losing our lives is a cheap price that we pay for
this cause."
Conclusion In the
three days since the JaK made its claim, no other
organization has attempted to negate the JaK's
claim and assert its own. That lends favor to the
legitimacy of the JaK's claim, although if Merah
was a lone wolf there would be no other group that
could make a legitimate claim. The details are
still unclear and without any further
corroborative evidence, the JaK's claim alone does
not establish a link to Merah.
From
another perspective, it is probably relevant to
Kazakhstan that mainstream international media
organizations have given scant attention to the
JaK's claim. When the media mention the JaK, they
refer to the JaK as "an al-Qaeda-linked group"
without noting the JaK's distinct connection to
Kazakhstan.
This is despite that in a
November 2011 statement, the JaK said, "As for us
in the Battalion, more than 90% of us are from
Kazakhstan..."
In a separate December 2010
statement after labor protesters were killed in
Zhanaozen, the JaK said, "We call upon you to
continue in your revolution against the [President
Nursultan] Nazarbayev regime because this regime
aims to undermine the Kazakh identity. Starting
from today, we don't just demand the abolition of
unjust laws, but we demand the ouster of
Nazarbayev and his henchmen from the government."
Kazakhstan has had difficulty since its
independence in 1991 to win the respect it feels
it deserves as a religiously moderate, politically
stable and economically vibrant country in a key
geopolitical region. The controversy over the
movie Borat, which stigmatized Kazakhstan
as a backwards nation, spurred the government to
spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire
British and American public relations firms to
clean up the country's image. International
attention to the JaK claim could have put
Kazakhstan in the spotlight, but now as a country
producing international terrorists.
Domestically within Kazakhstan opposition
parties and religious activists who have accused
the government of creating the JaK as an excuse to
crack down on political rivals will have less
ammunition to make this claim. The JaK has once
again shown that it exists. In addition, each one
of the JaK's claims in 2011 was believed to be
legitimate based on their timing and the knowledge
about the details of the attacks in the claims.
If the JaK is indeed a legitimate jihadi
group that now has international ambitions, it may
seek to strike abroad or in Kazakhstan again, or
it may become a media-savvy enterprise that
over-compensates for its lack of capacity to
launch terrorist attacks by claiming attacks
anywhere.
As Kazakhs finish up their
Nowruz holiday this week, they will certainly hope
for none of the above for the sake of their
partner states in the Organization for Security
and Cooperation in Europe, such as France, their
domestic security, and their international
reputation.
Notes 1. See,
for example, these JaK videos
in Russian.
Jacob Zenn has
extensive experience in all seven "Stan" countries
in Central Asia, including Russian language study
in Bishkek in 2007, Farsi/Tajik language study in
Samarkand in 2008, and Uyghur/Uzbek language study
in Urumqi, Xinjiang province, China in 2010 and
2011. He also runs an open-source research,
translation and due diligence team focusing at
Zopensource.net. He can be reached at
Zopensource123@gmail.com.
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