4 April: A woman reacts while placing flowers in honour of the victims of the 3 April blast on the platform of Technological Institute metro station in Saint Petersburg. (c) NurPhoto/SIPA USA/PA Images. All rights reserved.In the first week of April 2017, Central Asia rose to global prominence as an exporter of Islamist terrorism. In St Petersburg, an ethnic Uzbek from southern Kyrgyzstan detonated a bomb on the city metro, taking 14 lives. A few days later, a citizen of Uzbekistan drove a truck into a store in Stockholm, killing four.
While few Central Asians have joined the Taliban and other Islamists in Afghanistan, many more have gone to join the so-called Islamic State. Estimates vary widely, reflecting the difficulty of tracking recruits who cross multiple borders, but perhaps somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 Central Asian citizens have travelled to Syria and Iraq in the past five years. Central Asian militants were involved in the June 2016 Ataturk airport attack and January 2017 nightclub attack, both in Istanbul. Central Asians have certainly grabbed headlines with attacks in recent months. But these are not the first signs that global jihadism is spreading to Central Asia.
There’s no evidence that religious, economic or political root causes in Central Asia are responsible for its “export of terrorism”
