A team of two gunmen killed three security officers and two civilians in an attack on police station and an office of the National Security Committee (KNB [6]) in Kazakhstan's commercial capital Almaty July 18. While no group has yet taken responsibility for the attack, the shootings come a month after a deadly assault in the northwestern town of Aktobe. In the June 6 incident, a number of militants in Aktobe stole guns from sporting goods stores and attacked a military post. In the ensuing shoot-out, 12 of the attackers were killed and nine were detained. Within days, a court in Aktobe convicted the nine and three alleged accomplices of plotting the attack on behalf of ISIS. The suspects in the Almaty attack remain at large. A "terrorism alert" has been declared in the city. While this is the first report of an ISIS franchise [7] in Kazakhstan, depressed oil prices [8] are causing economic chaos in the Central Asian nation. (Russia Direct [9], EurasiaNet [10], NYT [11], Bloomberg [12])
