A nation must think before it acts.
Senior Fellow Stephen Blank Quoted by VOA News on Central Asian ISIS fighters
As the Islamic State terror group is steadily losing territory in Syria and neighboring Iraq, Moscow fears that many fighters from countries in Central Asia may return home from the Mideast battlegrounds and trigger instability in the region, which could also pose a security threat to Russia.
Analysts confirmed the presence of Central Asian fighters within the ranks of the Islamic State (IS), but said Russia’s concerns were overblown.
“It will be very, very hard to imagine more than a handful or two of Iraq and Syria foreign fighters that came from Central Asia ever making it back there,” Thomas Lynch, a research fellow at the National Defense University in Washington, told VOA.