Tag Archives: Abu Umar al-Tajiki

The Unravelling of a Guided Islamic State Plot in Russia

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 26 February 2019

Islamic State terrorists responsible for the Danghara attack in Tajikistan, July 2018 [source]

Kommersant reports on the FSB foiling a series of guided plots by the Islamic State (IS) in late 2016. The IS guide in these cases was a Tajik, Tojiddin Nazarov (Abu Usama Noraki). Had IS’s operations been successful, they would have blown up the headquarters of Russian military intelligence (GRU) on the Khoroshevskoye Highway, as well as railway passengers. Continue reading →

Russia’s Unreliable Claims About the Islamic State

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 1 October 2017

Gulmurod Khalimov

The Islamic State’s (IS) caliph, Ibrahim al-Badri (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi), appeared on Thursday to deliver his first speech in nearly a year. Other than the contents of the speech, al-Badri’s re-appearance was confirmation that the claim by the Russian government, on 16 June, to have killed al-Badri and 330 other IS jihadists in a 28 May airstrike in Syria, was false.[1] This is far from the first mendacious claim Moscow has made on this topic.

On 8 September, the Russian Ministry of Defence claimed it had killed “four influential field commanders”, one of whom was Tarad al-Jarba (Abu Muhammad al-Shimali), and forty other IS jihadists, in an airstrike near Deir Ezzor city. Later in the day, the Russians claimed day that another of the four commanders was Gulmurod Khalimov (Abu Umar al-Tajiki), named by the U.S.-led coalition as IS’s War Minister. In fact, it is likely that Khalimov was already dead and that al-Jarba is still alive. Continue reading →

The Leadership Structure of the Islamic State

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 6 August 2017

A year ago, I wrote a report documenting the biographies of Islamic State (IS) leaders and something of the structure of the organisation. Since then, the intricacies of the structure have been further revealed, even as it has somewhat crumbled in practice. The caliphate—the statelet built by IS—has been significantly degraded: the Iraqi “capital”, Mosul, has fallen, and operation to clear the Syrian “capital”, Raqqa, is underway. More significantly, upwards of 40% of those profiled have been killed, so it seemed an opportune moment for an update on who currently leads the world’s most infamous terrorist movement.
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