In a speech to the Russian Federal Assembly on February 29, prior to being re-elected to a fifth presidential term in a parody of an election, Vladimir Putin once again lashed out at the "so-called West" and Westerners. "They want to replicate in Russia what they have done in numerous other countries, including Ukraine," he stated. "Sowing discord in our home and weakening us from within." International terrorism was only mentioned once – and even then, in the past tense.
Less than a month later, the master of the Kremlin can count on the media to try to fit the devastating attack perpetrated by Islamic State Khorasan Province (IS-K) on March 22 in a concert hall on the outskirts of Moscow into the only box provided for threats: the one that necessarily implicates Ukraine's involvement.
Yet this bloodbath is a dramatic reminder of the resilience of an ideology that has survived the destruction of the self-proclaimed caliphate established in the Middle East in the disintegrating spaces of states weakened by civil wars born of their barbarity, in Syria, or the consequences of foreign invasion, in Iraq. Jihadist groups are totally indifferent to the new course of history that began on February 24, 2022, with Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
The return of conventional warfare between countries on European soil has set in motion once again the heavy machinery of strategic alliances and the remobilization of the European defense industry, atrophied by more than three decades of the illusion of perpetual peace and doux commerce, during which armed conflicts were often limited to the dispatch of special forces against distant militias. The invasion of Ukraine, like the subsequent war in Gaza, also highlighted the isolation of a Western camp in the face of a group of countries imperfectly summed up by the expression "Global South," convinced that the principles of the former are subject to variable geometry.
A formidable problem
But in the world view of the perpetrators of the March 22 attack, such fracture lines are negligible. In 2022, an IS publication, Al-Naba, summed up Russian aggression as a "war between the Orthodox crusaders." Another publication belonging to the branch that claimed responsibility for the Moscow terrorist attack, Voice of Khurasan, criticized both "America (...), a furious enemy of Islam throughout the last century," and Russia, which "has proven no different."
This juxtaposition poses a formidable problem. The latest attacks claimed by IS-K include the one carried out on January 3 in Iran against a crowd paying tribute to the former commander of the Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani, killed in Baghdad in 2020 by an American strike. It was the deadliest terrorist operation in Iran (some 90 dead) since the 1979 revolution, while that targeting the Russian concert hall was the bloodiest (139 dead) for two decades.
You have 46.25% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.