International experts say Kazakhstan's January events were terrorist attacks

According to international experts, the violent unrest that erupted across Kazakhstan in early January should be considered acts of terrorism based on all objective criteria — level of violence, sophistication of the organisation and severity of attacks, and targeted targets on government institutions.

The event, hosted by the President of Kazakhstan's Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies, was meant to provide a forum for discussion on global and regional terrorism and violent extremism trends.

The sad events in Almaty, according to Acting Adjunct Assistant Professor Jacob Zenn of Georgetown University's Security Studies Program (SSP), displayed a relatively unique form of terrorist occurrence.

"It wasn't a typical terrorist act, like a hotel explosion," Zenn said. "There was a huge number of people, and while some of them may not have intended to engage in militant action at the outset, they became engulfed in the violence perpetrated by criminal and radical elements."

Another oddity of the issue is that no recognised terrorist organisation has been linked to the events thus far. According to Zenn, it's critical to look into the possibility of jihadist groups or Kazakh foreign fighters encouraging or organising those acts.

Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, a research fellow at George Washington University's Program on Extremism, and another speaker, Jacob Zenn, both emphasised the necessity of government firm acts in restraining violence and avoiding the spread of assaults at an early stage.

"When anything is classified as terrorism, the government can take exceptional measures to combat it, like we saw in Kazakhstan," Zenn explained.

Failure to do so "allows [the situation] to spiral into a civil war, which is something terrorist groups exploit and take advantage of," as happened in Syria. The Kazakh law enforcement agencies and government institutions, on the other hand, acted rapidly to take the appropriate steps," Tamimi noted.

Putting the events of January in a global context, Zenn stated that Central Asia's domestic security situation is unexpectedly stable.

"Terrorism in Central Asia is nowhere near the degree we see in other parts of the world or in the United States." People expected terrorism to extend into Central Asia one day as a result of the Taliban and ISIS, but in general, terrorism has not taken root in this region to the level that it has in other places or to the amount that people have predicted. As a result, I believe it is worthwhile to investigate how the government, religious institutions, civil society, and security services responded to these difficulties," Zenn stated.

Both experts agreed that there is a large area for foreign and Kazakh researchers to collaborate on understanding the causes of security challenges in Central Asian countries and developing solutions.

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