There is a certain cruel irony in the fact that Russia, the perpetrator of numerous terrorist attacks in recent years from Syria to Ukraine, was itself attacked by terrorists on Friday night. Heavily armed looters stormed the Crocus Town Hall concert venue in Moscow, killing at least 133 people and injuring more than 100.
The Islamic State group quickly claimed responsibility, with U.S. intelligence warning the Kremlin that the Afghanistan-based ISIS affiliate group Khorasan (ISIS-K) was planning an attack on Moscow. It soon became clear that something was wrong. The U.S. Embassy in Moscow at one point told Americans in the capital to avoid concert halls.
But Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has blithely dismissed the prescient US message, focusing on the imagined threat posed by Ukraine's alleged Nazis rather than the real threat posed by Islamist terrorists. did. President Putin offered insight into his own twisted mind earlier this week, calling the U.S. notice a “provocative” akin to “blatant blackmail and an intention to blackmail and destabilize society.” ” he said.
The fact that Putin ignored U.S. attempts to help, and that his own security forces ultimately failed to thwart the Moscow attack, tells you everything you need to know about the nature of his regime. President Putin has no interest in serving the Russian people or protecting them from real threats, and his regime is better at suppressing peaceful dissidents than violent terrorists.
Putin's goal is to achieve imperial glory as a latter-day emperor, even at the expense of the long-suffering Russian people. Now, rather than go after the actual enemy, he may be trying to find some way to limit Moscow's attacks to Ukraine and the United States and use it to justify further attacks on innocent Ukrainians. unknown.
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The Kremlin's failure to stop the ISIS-K attack comes just months after U.S. intelligence agencies issued a similar warning to Iran about the ISIS-K attack. In the end, the mullahs did not listen to the words of the Islamic State. Great Satan! ” Islamic State was able to carry out two bombings in Iran on January 3, in the town of Kerman, where the US military had gathered to commemorate the death of Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force, in an airstrike. More than 95 people were killed. Terrorist organization in the Middle East.
Like the Russian regime, the Iranian regime is undoubtedly over-promoting its own propaganda portraying the United States as an enemy, thus refusing to give credence to what this supposed enemy is telling them. . You don't need a degree in psychology to detect this projection. Just as neither Vladimir Putin nor Ayatollah Khamenei could imagine informing Washington of terrorist plots in the United States to save the lives of ordinary Americans, these tyrants also cannot imagine that Washington would inform Russia or I can't imagine trying to save him. Iranians live there. They must have imagined that the US warning was some kind of trap. Because it was inconceivable that Americans (who routinely accuse complex plots against the regime) would be naive enough to help the enemy.
After the US's earlier warning to Iran became public, some Americans also criticized the Biden administration for notifying Iran. After all, Iranian proxies have been attacking U.S. forces in the Middle East for years. Why not give them a taste of their own medicine? But that's not the way the US intelligence community operates, and the US government distinguishes between combatants and non-combatants, so we should be happy about that. America's enemies ignore such distinctions.
U.S. intelligence agencies have a “duty to warn” victims of impending terrorist attacks, and such warnings have typically been issued to U.S. citizens or U.S. allies, but the Biden administration has announced that Moscow and Tehran will Of course, he also warned me. Terrorists should be considered “enemies of humanity” under international law, and all countries should have an obligation to hunt down terrorists. Just because Russia and Iran are complicit in their own terrorism does not mean the United States should be complicit in terrorism against Russian or Iranian civilians.
To be honest, when I first heard about the terrorist attacks in Moscow, my first concern was that Ukrainians might have been responsible. I'm very glad they didn't. Because nothing delegitimizes Ukraine's cause faster than complicity in terrorism. A similar thing happened to Chechen militants, who committed mass murders in Russia in the early 2000s and lost international support. (Russian security services were accused of independently carrying out the Russian apartment bombings in 1999 and blaming Chechens.
However, Ukraine, like the United States, is a law-ruled democracy that does its best to minimize civilian casualties from military operations, so involvement of Ukrainians was always out of the question. The Ukrainians have targeted Russian infrastructure (such as oil refineries) that is being used to support the invasion of Ukraine, but they have not been involved in terrorist bombings of Russian cities. In contrast, Russia has previously carried out terrorist bombings against civilians in Chechnya and Syria, and that is exactly what Russia is doing against Ukrainian cities.
These early war crimes are now catching up with Russia. Because they helped convince the Islamic State that Russia was every bit as much an enemy of the Islamic State as the United States. As reported by Foreign Policy magazine, in 2022 ISIS-K's English-language magazine declared that “America has been a fierce enemy of Islam throughout the last century, and Russia has proven to be no different.” .
That the Islamic State remains capable of carrying out such attacks, despite an anti-ISIS campaign launched a decade ago by an international coalition including the United States, shows how difficult it is to eradicate the terrorist organization. A harsh reminder of how difficult it is. Although the United States and its partners, particularly the Iraqi Security Forces and Syrian Democratic Forces, succeeded in destroying the ISIS “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State's virulent ideology continues to inspire ISIS-K fanatics. ing.
This is a warning that Israel should heed in its current campaign against Hamas. The IDF can break Hamas's hold on the Gaza Strip, but it cannot eradicate Hamas' ideology. Indeed, by inflicting so much suffering on Palestinians, Israeli operations may only inspire a new generation of extremists.
The question now is whether an effective international coalition can be assembled to deal with the growing threat of ISIS-K. That would have to include some rather strange bedfellows: the United States, Russia, Iran, and the Taliban. The United States has indeed engaged in limited cooperation with the Taliban against ISIS-K. Some U.S. special operations forces in Afghanistan jokingly referred to themselves as the “Taliban Air Force” as they leveraged U.S. air power to support Taliban ground attacks against ISIS-K strongholds. .
But based on recent history, it seems doubtful that there will be much cooperation between the United States and Russia or Iran, no matter how beneficial it may be to those countries. Both regimes cannot afford to be seen as cooperating with Washington, as they are focused on antagonizing the United States to justify their repressive rule. They prefer fighting imaginary enemies rather than real terrorists.
The United States would need to be careful about revealing its intelligence agencies' sources and methods to such a hostile government. Because the divisions between the “infidel” regimes are so great, ISIS-K may find scope to expand its international operations, including a gruesome move to target the United States and its allies in the Middle East and Europe. It also includes the possibility of doing so.
