In March 22, a terrorist attack killed at least 137 people at the Crocus City Hall in Krasnogorsk at the edge of Moscow city during a rock concert. The incident had echoes of Moscow’s Nord-Ost theatre siege in 2002, where more than 170 people died, and the 2004 seizure of a school in Beslan in which 334 people, including 186 children, perished. Those attacks were carried out by Chechen militants fighting a separatist war against Russia. They had ties to Al Qaeda-related groups at the height of the early years of the first cycle of global terror.
The Krasnogorsk incident, which seemed to suggest a pattern akin to earlier incidents in Russia, initially threw up a few possibilities. First that it was related to and an outcome of the Russian involvement in the war against Ukraine, that it was a Ukraine-initiated event to take the war into Russia’s interior. This was vehemently denied by Ukraine, which, despite bearing the brunt of Russian assaults on its cities and civil populations, has not attempted to target the Russian civilian population. The action appeared to be aimed at embarrassing President Putin either during the election or immediately afterwards.
Claims and investigations involving body cam clips of the incident ultimately point towards the Afghanistan-based Islamic State of Khorasan Province (ISKP), which accuses Russia of having Muslim blood on its hands in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Syria. If the ISKP claim is true, then it signifies an attempt to signal that it has finally established itself in the vicinity of the near abroad region in sufficient measure to target Russia and its interests, including those in and around Central Asia.
The Kremlin is obviously concerned. In addition to the much-projected image of national unity in the war against Ukraine, Russia is also increasingly economically dependent on seasonal and migrant workers, particularly from Central Asia; remember, Russia has a dwindling population. Also, do recall that Russia once had a token number of troops deployed in Tajikistan to keep an eye on the area, which has 72 million Muslims all vulnerable to the vile propaganda of the ISKP and similar exponents of Islamic terrorism. This deployment is now history once the Russian Army found itself deficient in troops in Ukraine.
Krasnogorsk is an event that has been condemned around the world without full realisation of what its geopolitical significance is. On one hand, there are beliefs about the connection of ISKP through the mother organisation ISIS to the US, which, it is alleged, is the main sponsor of ISIS to prevent a Russian-Iranian takeover of Syria and northern Iraq. No credible evidence of this has ever been presented. Krasnogorsk appears to increasingly signify the return of global terror; the making of a second cycle after the decline of the first witnessed during the pandemic. This was something anticipated for long; the recent historical legacy is important to understand.
We have believed that global terror incubated in Afghanistan after ISIS lost the battle of Mosul in 2018. The latter led to it attempting a failed revival in Marawi in the Philippines and a last-ditch attempt in Sri Lanka with the Easter bombings in April 2019. With the coming of the pandemic in 2020, terrorism went into a shell but with all networks intact; a phenomenon that takes place when terror groups temporarily withdraw to recoup. ISIS gravitated to Northern Afghanistan in an area where neither the Taliban nor the coalition forces had presence or control. The US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 offered the greatest opportunities to terrorist groups to break their shackles and emerge as before. The situation in the Middle East was yet in the middle of the follow-up to the Abraham Accords.
The outbreak of the Ukraine war in February 2022, six months after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, took away a lot of attention from the likely threats of international terrorism. The rise of the Afghan Taliban, the encouragement it has given to the Tehreek e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), and in the last five months the atrocities across Gaza after an equally obnoxious display of terrorism by Hamas against innocents in Southern Israel have all given rise to the sentiments that have gone into the making of fresh triggers. These have the potential to take the world back to the days of 9/11 and thereafter. Islamic radicalism is back and flourishing.
From Afghanistan as a base, Islamic terrorists have been able to strike Pakistan, Turkey and Iran. Afghanistan’s Taliban government appears to be taking on the mantle once donned by Zia ul Haq and the ISI to be one of the lead sponsors of terrorism through motivation using the radical route. The Taliban is using its surrogate, the Tehreek e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) as the sword arm of this attempt to revive militant Islam and have greater control over it.
Al Qaeda has been quieter in comparison and is yet trying to re-establish its significance in the new strategic matrix that global revival of terrorism is trying to create. In the strange world of global terrorism, although there is little or no coordination, a live and let live norm seems to have come into existence, at least for now. The Af-Pak region, where the terror footprint is increasing by the day, will find state response increasingly weak and easy to overcome, given Pakistan’s utter downturn in its security capability; that is a nation that fought terror through the conventional mode during Operation Zarb e Azb.
With the display of brazen capability to establish networks in Central Asia, execute acts in Russia’s capital and remain capable of targeting the Iranian city of Kerman, even during an event in memory of national hero General Qassem Soleimani, the ISKP is demonstrating a creeping expansion. Recent exposes in India reflect the tip of the possible iceberg. The nation that should be most worried is China. Its counter terrorism experience is next to nil, except for the string of some very harsh measures in Xinjiang from where many of the fighters of the ISKP hail.
The second cycle of global terror will be countered by much greater experience, but much more technologies are also available to terrorists. Even with impending ceasefires in Ukraine and Gaza, it’s unlikely that the world will witness too much peace as yet.
Lt Gen Syed Ata Hasnain (Retd) | Former Commander, Srinagar-based 15 Corps. Now Chancellor, Central University of Kashmir
(Views are personal)
(atahasnain@gmail.com)