FAILURE TEST

According to the British consulting company Maplecroft specialized in analysis of all possible risks and publishing the annual "Terrorism Risk Index", there is no area in the world unexposed to threats of terrorism, with the exception of Greenland and Antarctica.

According to the same "Index", Kazakhstan until recently was one of the countries with low threat of terrorism. It stays much lower in the Index than the United States, Britain, France and other wealthy countries.

In the last four years, the population of this largest Central Asian nation could get information about terrorist attacks only through news bulletins from other countries, including from its closest neighbors.

It surely does not mean that there is no crime, religious fanatics, extremists and other anti-social personalities in Kazakhstan. On the contrary, according to statistics provided by the law enforcement agencies, the number of such groups of people in the country increases every year. However, the country constantly and quite successfully ensures that all kinds of proactive measures are in place.

Yet the terrorist attacks in Aktobe and Almaty occurred in June and July, respectively, has not surprised the expert community of Kazakhstan. This burst of activity was predicted and attributed not only to foreign centers of terrorism although their influence is quite noticeable. Despite all the security measures, the level of terrorist propaganda from the outside grows in Kazakhstan. For example, only during the last three years, there were five video messages authored by people from Kazakhstan, designed specifically for this country, and distributed through the so-called Islamic State (IS).

Just a couple weeks before the events in Aktobe, the IS called for the organization of terrorist attacks in the states where the authorities impede the departure of citizens to Syria.

It is speculated that this call was one of the catalysts of the terrorist attack committed on June 5 when 25 criminals attacked the two stores and then tried to seize weapon warehouses at one of the military units. According to the official version, the terrorists were supporting non-traditional religious movement of Salafism. While there is no precise data available, many tend to assume that they were not members of the IS, Al-Qaeda or any other terrorist organization but belonged to one of the latent local groups.

The term ‘latent’ refers to a group of people with radical views, which is not a subsidiary of any major international terrorist organizations, and more often does not maintain contacts with them. But they certainly are under the influence of external propaganda made of video clips, downloads and photos wide spread through social networks. The isolation of such cells is dangerous because they can plan various acts of terrorism and, at the same time, can be difficult to predict and identify.

There are various assumptions of the reasons why the perpetrators were trying to seize a large number of firearms: the attempt to free their fellow believers from the nearby penal colony to capture the city with a 400-thousand population.

In response, the law enforcement was able to kill 18 terrorists and arrest the rest of the group members. However, the criminals murdered seven people including four civilians.

In Almaty, there was only one criminal who killed six people.

One of the main objectives of any terrorist attack is an attempt to cause panic among the population. They have managed to achieve this objective in Aktobe and Almaty thanks to a rather prolonged information vacuum. While the citizens of Almaty could not get any reliable information for some three hours, the residents of Aktobe have been fed with rumors for a few days being in almost total information blockade. Nobody has explained the population anything about the events, how to behave and what security measures to take. This surely has led to panic.

Meanwhile, many experts could identify certain similarities in both attacks. Namely, the targets were the representatives of law and order. The age of criminals was between 20 and 30 years. The shooter in Almaty and most of the attackers in Aktobe had been prosecuted earlier.

According to the Director of the Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies Yerlan Karin, the attack on law enforcement agencies can be interpreted as an act of revenge or warning from the radical groups as a response to deterrent measures taken by the security forces. When security forces start trailing or prevent departure of such terrorists abroad in order to prevent their contacts with radical structures in Afghanistan or Syria, the members of these cells try to respond by fighting back. At the same time, the radicals often do not adhere to any pre-designed tactics or action plan. Their actions are classified as terrorist acts since they are designed to intimidate society.

The participation of criminals in terrorist attacks suggests that in Kazakhstan the radical cells are mostly a mixture of criminal groups and religious communities. Mainly the Wahhabis become close with criminals in jails and prisons where inmates are infected by radical ideologies. This shows the weakness of the preachers of traditional Islam.

Compared to other countries of the region, the fundamentalist Islamic sentiments are not very popular among the local population of Kazakhstan. However, last year, the then chairman of the National Security Committee of Kazakhstan Nurtai Abykayev said that his country has faced a "massive recruitment, propaganda ideology of extremism and terrorism through the Internet, illegal entry into the country of extremist literature and various missionaries. Due to the lack of religious literacy, these ideas contribute to the radicalization of the faithful, especially those who have recently embraced Islam. Some of them, particularly the representatives of the socially vulnerable segments of population, mistakenly believe that they start to understand the roots of injustice in the befallen the world and think about the participation in the so-called jihad".

Eralan Karin believes that even the terrorism does not have serious institutional and ideological basis Kazakhstan, the country will most likely face a huge manifestation of radicalism. First of all, this is facilitated by, certain socio-economic conditions: unemployment, low incomes, criminalization, marginalization of youth, corruption, weakening of many social and political institutions. All this, he says, exacerbates the problem of social injustice in the community and gives rise to radical preachers.

This means that terrorist activity may be a flash in other cities of Kazakhstan, where the number of Salafis, according to law enforcement agencies, has reached a critical mass. Besides the western regions this may be the country's south and the northern part of territories where the program operated resettlement of surplus population from the south.

President Nursultan Nazarbayev ordered to amend the legislation on liabilities for terrorist acts. In particular, this will make grounds to increase measures on deprivation and restriction of freedom, the introduction of the norms of the confiscation of property, deprivation of citizenship for persons who have left the country for terrorist activities.

At the same time, the head of the state has issued a decree on measures to improve the welfare of citizens.