Could ex-ISIL fighters be used against Iran, as a Russian official claimed?

Alexander Bortnikov, head of Russia’s Federal Security Service, claimed late in May that the West is trying to use ex-fighters of the ISIL (ISIS) armed group against Iran.

“Western intelligence services don’t give up on their attempts to utilise militant terrorists from Syria as proxy forces in the war against Iran,” Aleksandr Bortnikov told a meeting of intelligence officials from eight ex-Soviet nations on May 26, according to the state-run RIA Novosti news agency.

In February, the United States began transporting thousands of imprisoned fighters linked to ISIL from detention centres in northeastern Syria to Iraq. The move followed the decision of Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa to join the anti-ISIL coalition and regain control of northeastern areas controlled by Kurdish-dominated forces that had detained up to 9,000 ISIL fighters, according to the US military.

Bortnikov did not specify which Western nation’s intelligence service is allegedly trying to “utilise” them and did not present any evidence, such as intercepted conversations or photos.

So has Russia’s intelligence tsar and President Vladimir Putin’s closest ally revealed a clandestine Western operation against Iran, or was his announcement an attempt to influence Moscow’s former vassals?

Bortnikov’s agency, better known by its Russian acronym, FSB, is the main successor to the Soviet KGB, where he served with Putin in the 1980s.

The FSB has a history of misinforming Putin, especially about developments in Ukraine, according to the White House, multiple leaks and media reports.

Gennady Gudkov, an ex-KGB officer and lawmaker-turned Putin critic, said Bortnikov’s claims reflect a lack of oversight over security agencies in today’s Russia.

“These are just words, without any proof, not even an attempt to back them with details or facts,” said Gudkov, who served in the KGB in the 1980s and was stripped of his lawmaker’s status in 2012 after participating in protest rallies and lambasting government corruption.

He told Al Jazeera that when he was part of parliamentary commissions on security in the 2000s, lawmakers, prosecutors and courts could exert at least theoretical control over what security agencies said and did.

“When all control over them was gone, they understood they could lie about anything at all, and no one could check them,” said Gudkov, who fled Russia in 2019 and is wanted there as a “terrorist and extremist”.

In his comments about ISIL, Bortnikov reiterated the FSB’s earlier claims that Western intelligence “created” the armed group and “trained” its fighters.

“ISIL’s history began back in the day in similar Iraqi prison compounds that were overseen by special services of the [US-led] Western coalition” fighting in Iraq, Bortnikov reportedly said.

“That’s when our nations reported a significant growth in the number of adherents of the jihadist ideology,” he reportedly said.

Bortnikov’s claim ‘a bit far-fetched’

Thousands of residents of Russia’s mostly-Muslim region of the North Caucasus joined ISIL more than a decade ago, often taking their families with them and occasionally rising through the ranks.

Russian intelligence let thousands of alleged “radicals” from the North Caucasus flee to ISIL-controlled areas in Syria and Iraq and recruited agents or informers among them, often by blackmailing their relatives at home, observers say.

Some of these jailed agents have been transferred to Iraq and have contacted their superiors in Russia, according to Nikolay Mitrokhin, an expert with Germany’s Bremen University.

Bortnikov’s analysts interpreted their messages, adding “a political construction about what they don’t necessarily share but containing what Putin wants to hear”, Mitrokhin told Al Jazeera.

“Statements by Russian special services are always enigmatic and based on unknown premises, but deciphering them is easy,” he said.

Bortnikov’s claim “is a bit far-fetched”, Ruslan Suleymanov, an associate fellow at the New Eurasian Strategies Centre, a US-British think tank, told Al Jazeera. “So far, this information is mostly rumours.”

He said, however, that some former members of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a group once led by President al-Sharaa and its allies, left Syria for eastern and southeastern Afghanistan, where the ISIL affiliate in Khorasan Province (ISKP) keeps operating.

These areas border Pakistan.

“There, they feel much more comfortable than in Syria, where the new authorities personified by Ahmed al-Sharaa fully distanced themselves from the Islamic State, joined the anti-ISIL coalition headed by Washington,” Suleymanov said.

Bortnikov’s information about contacts between Western intelligence and former ISIL fighters “seems rather possible,” according to Nikita Smagin, an expert on Russia-Iran ties.

“But building ties doesn’t mean that in the end, these forces would march against Iran,” he told Al Jazeera.

Bortnikov’s allegations could also be the Kremlin’s attempt to restore its waning clout in former Soviet republics.

“The rhetoric of fright, of showing that the US is more dangerous because they do this or that, and we can help you – this rhetoric works with this logic,” Smagin said.

When addressing ex-Soviet security officials, Bortnikov purported that the alleged Western efforts to “utilise” ISIL create a security threat to the ex-Soviet nations in Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus that border Iran or its neighbours, and whose intelligence officers were at the meeting.

Azerbaijan and Armenia border Iran and used to be its provinces.

Central Asian nations of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan share historic ties with Iran.

Thousands of people from Central Asia joined ISIL.

Bortnikov claims that if “recruited” by Western intelligence, these people could become conduits of “undermining” influence.

“The West is trying to block integration processes, undermine [ex-Soviet] nations from within, force their peoples to forget their common history and pit them against each other [in order] to install its rule here,” Bortnikov claimed.

Another observer said Bortnikov’s words “aren’t worth being taken literally”.

They sound “more like an element of information-political rhetoric than the reflection of a real picture”, Emil Mustafayev, chief editor of the Minval Politika magazine based in Baku, capital of Azerbaijan, told Al Jazeera.

Putin, Bortnikov’s boss, who has cultivated ties with Tehran for decades and backed it against Western sanctions, has not repeated the claims.

No ex-Soviet security officers who attended the summit backed him publicly.

Moreover, the coverage of Bortnikov’s speech in Russia was limited to several reports in Kremlin-controlled media, and no pro-Kremlin political pundit expounded on it in op-eds or on television.

In October 2025, Bortnikov used a similar meeting of ex-Soviet intelligence chiefs in Uzbekistan’s Samarkand to accuse British intelligence of allegedly thwarting peace talks on Ukraine, organising attacks in ex-Soviet republics and attempting to blow up a Russian natural gas pipeline to Turkiye.

The United Kingdom dismissed those allegations as “utter nonsense”.