It is no secret that the Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K) group, identified as being behind the recent Moscow terror attack, hates Vladimir Putin and Russia. Russian military campaigns in Syria, Dagestan and Chechnia and Wagner Group actions in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger (as well as Mozambique and many other places) have positioned Russia as an enemy of these militant Islamists – and yet one of their more vulnerable foes. Putin’s (predictable) attempt to somehow blame the Ukrainians for the attack will fool very few at home or abroad.

Russian President Vladimir Putin 

This war between radical Islamists and Russia is not new at all, though the West has to some degree forgotten it with the arrival of the wider conflict in Ukraine. The Russian war with the Islamists goes way back to the breakup of the Soviet Union, which sparked several civil wars across former Soviet republics including Tajikistan – where the four arrested suspects are supposedly from.

Initially the Islamists were brutally suppressed by the Tajik authorities using their ‘OMON’ special police forces (many other post-Soviet countries including Russia have OMON units).  The commander of the Tajikistan OMON, Gulmurod Khalimov, defected to ISIS in 2015 and went on to become their Minister for War. While Khalimov was reportedly killed in a Russian strike in 2017, some sources believe he is still alive and active. With the arrest of four Tajik suspects, the attack may well have been directly inspired by Khalimov or his successors.

The nature of the attack has all the hallmarks of an ISIS atrocity, like the one in Paris in November 2015 which claimed the lives of 134 concert goers. Other attacks in Russia have included the Moscow theatre assault in 2002 which saw 132 hostages killed (mostly by a botched Russian attempt to gas the terrorists). Some 334 people – including 186 children – died in the Beslan school attack of 2004. More recently attacks on Moscow airport in 2011 and the St Petersburg Metro in 2017 again show a pattern and modus operandi typical of ISIS.

The intent is, as always, to goad the Russians into a disproportionate response against Muslims with the intent of further radicalising the sizable Russian Muslim minority – which will soon make up a third of Russia’s population. This will be one reason why Putin, after a period of silence, has chosen to blame Ukraine for the attack. Putin needs to galvanise support for his failing war at home and is currently engaged in a near frenzied recruitment drive in Muslim majority former USSR states, including Tajikistan. He cannot blame Tajikistan for the atrocity, despite the evidence being clear.

This attack also represents a catastrophic failure in intelligence for the Russian FSB security agency, with warnings of the attack having been published weeks ago by US and UK intelligence agencies, amongst others. Then there is a realisation that such a complex attack could not have been the work of four Tajiks in isolation.

Together, these facts make Putin and his regime look weak and vulnerable even as he casts around looking for more enemies – real or imagined – in order to rally an increasingly war-weary Russian public and maintain his grasp on power.

The attack is also a timely reminder to the rest of us that Putin’s crimes are not only of the last two years: he has been fighting brutal wars in many other places than Ukraine for decades and he must be stopped. As his opponents learned many times in Syria, any compromise will simply give him time to regroup and rearm before he re-starts the fight at a time and place of his choosing.

If there is a ceasefire in Ukraine, Putin will soon be back, much stronger than he is now. Confronting him then will come at a price that we in the unprepared and self-indulgent West will be unwilling to pay.