News From an Undesirable Organization

"RFE/RL has been declared an "undesirable organization" by the Russian government."

If you are in Russia or the Russia-controlled parts of Ukraine and hold a Russian passport or are a stateless person residing permanently in Russia or the Russia-controlled parts of Ukraine, please note that you could face fines or imprisonment for sharing, liking, commenting on, or saving our content, or for contacting us.

This warning could at some point in time come to the United States. Canada, our northern neighbor seems to be racing towards the Russian model of what you can write, read, see, say, or hear. We have some issues in the United States with restricting speech, and some in the media that will omit facts that endanger a political narrative.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is a bit different than the Voice of America (VOA) in that they have local reporters on the ground in the nations they cover. Unlike the big media networks, both US and European, RFE/RL reporters are scattered across a country, not just in the capitol of a nation.

The following story about the Moscow concert attack is a warning to the United States. Unlike Russia we have opened our border without vetting millions of border crossers in the last three years. By doing so the risk of a terrorist attack on our own nation is increasing.

From Radio Free Europe:

IS-K was founded by disgruntled members of the Afghan Taliban, the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan, and Al-Qaeda who declared allegiance to IS. Over the years, IS-K’s ranks have been further boosted by local recruits and foreign fighters, particularly those from the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. In a report published in June 2023, the UN Security Council said IS-K fighters included citizens of Pakistan, Iran, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and a small number of Arab fighters from Syria who had traveled to Afghanistan. The UN Security Council said the number of IS-K militants in Afghanistan ranges “from 4,000 to 6,000,” including family members. Some experts estimate that the number is much lower.

IS-K Attacks:

IS-K has carried out attacks against Afghan and international forces as well as the Taliban. It has also targeted Afghanistan’s religious minorities. The group carried out one of its most high-profile attacks -- the killing of 170 Afghan civilians and 13 members of the U.S. military at Kabul's international airport -- in August 2021 as foreign troops pulled out of Afghanistan. After the Taliban seized power that month, IS-K has since targeted Taliban officials, foreign nationals and embassies, Afghanistan's Shi’a Hazara community, and others it considers incompatible with its own extreme interpretation of Islam. On March 21, IS-K claimed responsibility for an attack outside a bank in Afghanistan’s southern city of Kandahar that killed at least 21 people, most of them Taliban employees. The group has also launched cross-border attacks. In January, IS-K was blamed for killing more than 90 people in Iran’s southern city of Kerman, the deadliest attack in the Islamic republic in decades. In September 2022, IS-K claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing outside the Russian Embassy in Kabul that killed at least six people, including two employees of the embassy. The attack did not surprise observers, who said IS-K had long threatened to carry out attacks inside Russia.

The United States is on the IS-K list of their targets:

Lucas Webber, co-founder and editor of MilitantWire.com, said IS had named Russia alongside the United States early on as a primary enemy. “This was only intensified in 2015 when Russia intervened militarily in Syria to support the government,” he said, referring to Moscow’s backing of President Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian civil war. “And it continued to intensify after Russia's various military and private military contractor interventions across Africa,” during which IS fighters were targeted, he added. Experts said Moscow’s support of the Taliban could have also motivated the attack. Russia, like the rest of the international community, does not recognize the Taliban government and officially considers the hard-line Islamist group to be a terrorist organization. But Moscow on multiple occasions has hosted Taliban officials and maintained an embassy in Kabul.

You can read the entire story by clicking on the link in this essay.