Astana

I will be in Astana for the next week attending a conference. Any readers based out here that fancy meeting up, do let me know on ajackson320@gmail.com

Bankers and Bombers in Kazakhstan

The Kazakh authorities claim to have foiled a major terror plot linked to fugitive banker and persona non grata Mukhtar Ablyazov. According to the Prosecutor General, Ablyazov provided $25,000 to Alexander Pavlov, who has been on the run since 2009 and who has served as Ablyazov’s personal bodyguard since 2005.

The money was allegedly used to buy bombs which would be set off in a number of locations in downtown Almaty on March 24, including parks and office buildings. The government says that the attacks were intended to “frighten the population, create an atmosphere of chaos and panic and destabilise the social and political situation in the country.”

Ablyazov was once Energy and Industry Minister before he fell from grace and set up an opposition party. Although he managed to regain favour, things changed when BTA began to collapse in 2008. He fled to the UK soon afterwards, claiming persecution. He is currently wanted for $4.5 billion in embezzlement and fraud.

He was able to stonewall the torturous court proceedings, although he lamented that being stuck between his luxurious office and his nine-bedroom mansion was “not dissimilar to a prison”. But when a UK High Court judge sentenced him to 22 months in February for contempt of court, he promptly vanished, allegedly on a bus to France. He has filed an appeal in absentia, which BTA is seeking to remove.

With the latest twist, the government is looking to paint Ablyazov as not just a crook but a dangerous terrorist with links to “representatives of radical religious groups”. This is not new – Ablyazov was, to begin with, also accused of masterminding the deadly unrest in Zhanoezen last December in connection with Rakhat Aliev, another of the exiled oligarchs. Both accusations seem paranoid or farcical by turns.

The Caspian in 2012 - Kazakhstan

This is the last in my series of guarded predictions for the year ahead in the Caspian region.

I have left Kazakhstan until last for the simple reason that it is the trickiest to predict. The three biggest political and security issues in the country – the labour unrest in the west, the militant threat and the presidential succession – are complex and defy easy forecasts.

After the crackdown on strikers in Zhanaozen on December 16, which led to at least 16 deaths and sparked riots elsewhere, the situation appears to have stabilised. President Nazarbayev’s response to the violence has been fairly efficient: regret has been expressed for the loss of life, prosecutors have begun investigating the police who shot protestors, reconstruction work has been launched, and Mangistau provincial governor Krymbek Kusherbayev has been sacked.

Equally telling is who is not being investigated or sacked – the senior security officials who orchestrated the operation. This may be distasteful for those who want justice to be done, but in practical terms it probably won’t mean that much.  As Joshua Foust notes, “Even if the punishment to the police is limited to a few symbolic prosecutions, that will in all likelihood be enough to halt any attempts to convert this horrible tragedy into a regime-ending event.”

Upcoming Kazakh reshuffle paves the way for Nazarbayev’s succession

This is pretty serious news:

Kazakh Prime Minister Karim Massimov will probably leave his post following the creation of a new government, Kazakh president's adviser Yermukamet Yertysbayev told Kazakh republican newspaper Liter.

Speculation has been swirling about the presidential succession for months, and it now seems we are getting a clear signal: Yertysbayev is known as the “president’s nightingale” for his role in cautiously communicating Nazarbayev’s intentions, so his pronouncements carry a lot of weight.

An evolution in Kazakh militant tactics?

Another militant attack has hit Kazakhstan, this time in the southern city of Taraz near the border with Kyrgyzstan. The country's deputy prosecutor general said that a lone gunman went on the rampage, killing five security officers, two civilians, and finally, setting off his explosive belt, himself. 

The attack is the single most deadly to have hit Kazakhstan in its year of discontent, which began with the suicide attack in Aktobe on May 17. It also marks a geographic expansion of the militant campaign, which has so far been concentrated in the west (with rare attacks in Almaty and Astana).

The full details of the Taraz attack are still a little sketchy and may never be fully revealed, but two things stand out from existing accounts. 

Firstly, the attacker - identified as 'Kariyev' - was fairly amateurish. He began by shooting dead two police officers who were tailing him, suggesting he was unable to disguise his intent and forced to begin his operation before intended. This goes some way to explaining the rest of the attack, in which Kariyev travelled between locations shooting police officers - and two civilians - as he did so, before blowing himself up as a police officer attempted to disarm him.

This is in line with other militant attacks in Kazakhstan, which appeared to have been the work of fairly unskilled operators who have, for instance, killed only themselves in premature bombings. The attacker was also alone, suggesting that a multi-member team could not be assembled for the attack. 

However the second point is that this may mark a tactical evolution of sorts. Kariyev may have simply been a suicide bomber on his way to a security service target, and armed as a precaution, when his cover was blown. But the Associated Press claims that at one point Kariyev went home to pick up a grenade launcher, a serious piece of kit which raises the possibility that this was a complex attack - a gun and grenade rampage ending with a suicide bombing, the favoured tactic of the Haqqani network in Afghanistan (among many others).

Previous attacks in Kazakhstan this year have been direct suicide bombings or gun attacks on security personnel. A combined attack suggests that the militants are becoming more confident, and capable of launching attacks outside their usual area of operations. The relative amateurishness of the attack does not contradict this.

Suspicion will fall on the Jund Al-Khilafah, the little-known militant group based on the Afghan-Pakistan border which threatened attacks in response to Kazakhstan's new restrictive law on religion, and claimed responsibility for the unsuccessful October 31st bombings in Atyrau. 

But questions remain over the relationship between Jund Al-Khilafah and the Kazakh militants. Are they sending ethnic Kazakh fighters back from Afghanistan to start a new wave of violence? Are they providing local militants with arms and training? Or are they simply inspiring religious Kazakhs to take up arms against the government?

Answers will be difficult to come by, but given the pace of attacks, it seems that the Taraz attack won't be the last in Kazakhstan's new struggle with Islamist militants.