Terrorism: the next target

By Richard North - March 25, 2024

There are many issues crowding the news agenda at the moment, but the Russian situation is not yet ready to loosen its grip.

I was, for instance, intrigued by Con Coughlin’s contribution in the Telegraph, written under the headline: “Putin must now realise he’s been fighting the wrong war”. The deadly attack in Moscow, says Coughlin, “will serve as a painful reminder of the threat posed by Islamist terrorism”.

Basically, that echoes my piece where I advanced exactly the same thought. Needless to say, such an obvious idea could hardly be confined to a single newspaper, and once again, the Guardian is in the fray with a multi-author piece following a not-dissimilar train of thought.

This piece, though, asks, “Did Ukraine war lead Russian security services to neglect Islamist threat?”, with the sub-heading which asserts: “Considering its giant security apparatus, Moscow’s slow response to terror attack is shocking”.

Of course, for those who are already convinced that the attack was a false flag operation arranged by the FSB, a “slow response” would be part of the gambit, but in the real world where incompetence is a far more potent force than conspiracy, it is germane to ask – as does the Guardian – how the attack could have happened.

The paper concedes that rooting out determined and well-trained terrorist cells is not an easy task for security services in any country – assuming that this attack was indeed carried out by such a group. But, it says, there are numerous signs that failing to prevent Friday’s attack was in large part down to a catastrophic security failure on the part of Russian authorities.

First, we are reminded that there was the public warning from the US government earlier in March that it had learned of “imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow” by terrorists. This has been rehearsed by multiple commentators, but it is also acknowledged that the warning was “generic” and therefore did not point to a specific target or time.

That notwithstanding, it does seem to be the case that the Russian security services did not take any additional precautions to protect such large gatherings. There are numerous accounts from witnesses suggesting that the security presence at the Crocus City Hall extremely light.

It is also evident that the police response to the attacks was slow, allowing the handful of gunmen to roam the venue at will, killing more than 100 people before slipping away without being apprehended or shot on the spot.

The Guardian thinks that, for a country with a giant, sprawling security apparatus, this slow response is shocking, although there have been instances in the United States and the UK where the response has been slow or uncoordinated, so we are not in much of a position to criticise.

Some Russians, we are told, pointedly compare the absent police response on Friday with the overwhelming police presence at the funeral of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, after his death in a Russian prison, although any comparison is hardly valid, one being scheduled while the other was a shock event.

Interestingly, the Sunday Times favourite, Mark Galeotti, gets a look in here, asserting that, “The FSB obviously had their priorities wrong”. In his view, they had their main resources on Ukraine and on the domestic opposition. “These are the priorities placed upon them from the top”, he says.

It is a given though, as Galeotti points out, that as the crackdown on dissent has intensified in the two years since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Putin’s security services have gone after people who put “likes” on anti-war social media content, LGBTQ+ adolescents who can now be accused of “extremism” simply for attending gay club nights, and people laying flowers in memory of Navalny.

It also comes as no surprise that thousands of security officials have been sent away from their day jobs in Russia to manage the takeover of newly occupied parts of Ukraine, rounding up Ukrainian sympathisers and sowing terror in a foreign country rather than keeping an eye on security threats at home.

But it seems there was also a feeling that the threat from domestic Islamist terrorism, ever-present during the first decade of Putin’s rule, had subsided. Strong-arm tactics in the North Caucasus region, combined with allowing several thousand radicals to leave for Syria and Iraq several years ago, led to a feeling that the fight against Islamist terror was over.

Here, the Guardian cites an analyst who works on the phenomenon inside Russia, who says that “Everybody relaxed and there was a general feeling that there was no longer a serious threat”.

We are also told that the dynamics at play in Friday’s attack, with most of the perpetrators apparently radicalised citizens of Tajikistan, are different to the terror attacks in the early part of Putin’s rule, when attackers tended to be from the North Caucasus.

Galeotti comes back in to says that: “Central Asian Islamic terrorism remains a real problem for the FSB. The FSB has a lot of experience dealing with extremists in the Caucasus, they have spent huge resources on that, but central Asia is more of a blind spot”.

There seems to be more to this blind spot, though, as Coughlin argues that the destruction of ISIL’s caliphate in Syria in 2017 generated a worrying tendency, both in Moscow and the West, to believe the threat posed by Islamist militants is on the wane.

He asserts that this was the thinking that informed the Biden administration’s disastrous decision to withdraw US-led coalition forces from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, handing control of the country over to the Taliban, ISIL’s ideological soulmates.

I’m not sure that is an entirely accurate assessment, given that there was no longer the political will to stem the Taliban advance on Kabul, but Coughlin notes that Putin even made a rare public declaration in support of Biden’s withdrawal decision.

One might suggest that, after Russian experiences in Afghanistan, and the US role in forcing its withdrawal, Putin’s reaction was only to be expected. But, whatever the motivation, he and others may have cause to regret that US forces so precipitately quit the country, following reports that the group responsible for the concert hall attack was based in Afghanistan and operated under the Taliban’s protection.

Coughlin then suggests that most world leaders regard the Taliban regime in Kabul as relatively benign, and again I’m not sure that that is the case. He does, however, concede that the Western intelligence community believes Afghanistan has once again become a safe haven for Islamist terror networks.

Moreover, he says, one of the more calamitous consequences of the 2021 withdrawal was the complete destruction of the West’s intelligence-gathering network there, which has eroded our ability to confront the Islamist threat.

I’m sure, though, that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence has a handle on the situation in Afghanistan and, although rarely paraded, the Indians have also a deep intelligence penetration in the country – not least as a means of keeping an eye on Pakistan’s back door.

There are two additional points that Coughlin makes. Firstly, terrorist organisations like Hamas – which adhere to the same Islamist creed as the Taliban – are increasing their capacity to carry out large-scale operations such as that of 7 October. Secondly, the tactics used by the terror group responsible for the Moscow attack were disturbingly similar to those that Hamas used in its assault on Israeli civilians.

In such circumstances, we are told, Putin, instead of escalating his confrontation with the West, would be better advised to give his backing to an international effort to combat the modern menace of Islamist-inspired terrorism.

Coughlin thinks a good place to start would be at the UN where Moscow could concentrate its efforts on tackling the disturbing rise of Islamist terrorism. That, he says, could prove far more effective at keeping Russia’s citizens safe than persisting with what he calls “his unwinnable war in Ukraine”.

That, probably, is being far too optimistic. As the Financial Times points out, there is no certainty as yet that Putin has abandoned attempts to link the attack with Ukraine, and it is not beyond the realms of possibility that this will become the official narrative.

It would be tragic for more than one reason if this proved to be the case. The West cannot assume that the ISIS-K threat is specific to Russia, especially as the group has a global ambitions, seeking to establish itself as the top jihadist movement in the world.

It has attempted to carry out operations in Europe and the New York Times warns that the group has grown bolder and more violent. There is no reason to believe, therefore, that a target in Europe might not be next.

As pertinent, ISIS-K is known to have ideological links with dissident groups in Pakistan. Many villages in eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan are home to Salafi Muslims, the same branch of Sunni Islam as the Islamic State, communities which have fuelled immigration to the UK.

With a strong Salafi presence amongst Muslim communities in the UK, where Salafism is said to have a strong power of fascination over younger South Asian generations, it is eminently possible that a British city could be the next target for an attack.

In better, saner times, we might have had hopes of enlisting the support of the Russians against this form of extremism – which seems to be growing daily. But as long as the Ukraine war continues, Putin’s focus looks as if it will remain fixed on the wrong enemy.