By Noah Rothman
Monday, March 25, 2024
The intellectual dexterity demanded of the Kremlin’s
propagandists has been tested to its limits in the days since Friday’s horrific
terrorist attack on a concert hall outside Moscow, in which at least 137 were
killed and scores more wounded. Today, the Putin regime’s more flexible
advocates are detailing the previously unknown extent to which the government
in Kyiv and its Jewish president have allegedly cultivated
ties to Islamic State militants. That is a novel twist on the enterprise
that the Russian regime’s mouthpieces devoted themselves to in the immediate
aftermath of the Crocus City Hall attack: blaming Ukraine directly for the
slaughter of Russian civilians.
Even as the attack was unfolding, Russian sources alleged
that the attack was the culmination of a vast Ukrainian plot. Former FSB
officials insisted that the attackers infiltrated Russia through
Ukraine’s all but impenetrable borders, likely with the support of Ukrainian
security officials and perhaps even the assistance of the Americans and the
British. If the terrorists didn’t enter Russia through Ukraine, that’s where
they were attempting to escape after the completion of their bloody work, Putin
himself alleged. One of his more zealous deputies, Dmitry Medvedev, promised there would be “retaliatory
terror” in the effort to square “death for death” when Ukrainian culpability
for this attack was more firmly established.
This tidy narrative seems to have been complicated by the claim from Islamic State Khorasan
that it is responsible for the attack. Likewise, farsightedly public efforts by
U.S. officials to warn Moscow of the tempo of chatter indicating that an
Islamist terrorist event inside Russia was imminent have frustrated Moscow’s
mythmakers. The Kremlin might be vexed that the horrific slaughter of its
citizens will not advance the regime’s foremost priority, conquering Ukraine.
But it isn’t clear that the Biden administration will be all that eager to
broadcast the warnings in this attack for the West.
After all, the Islamic State Khorasan, or ISIS-K, wasn’t
supposed to be the West’s problem anymore — not after the group killed 13 U.S.
troops and over 170 Afghan civilians at the attack at Abbey Gate amid the bugout from Afghanistan
in 2021. ISIS-K was said by Biden administration officials to be the Taliban’s
problem, and it was one to which our old foe was diligently attending.
“The Taliban has committed to prevent terrorist groups
from using Afghanistan as a base for external operations that could threaten
the United States or our allies, including Al Qaeda and ISIS-K,” Secretary of
State Antony Blinken said in testimony before Congress. No
one seemed to be buying it — not the elected officials Blinken had sought to
convince nor the former Trump and Obama administration intelligence officials
who rejected the notion that the Taliban had suddenly committed itself to the
scrupulous interdiction of Islamist terror plots. If it wasn’t al-Qaeda,
another Sunni terror organization would reconstitute itself in Afghanistan with
the aim of exporting terror to Europe and America. It was a matter of time before
the transnational plots gestating safely inside Afghanistan reached maturity.
That time is upon us.
We have had ample warning. Last year, the Washington Post pored over
the Pentagon documents leaked onto the online messaging platform Discord. The
ISIS-related information was among the most disturbing portions of that trove.
The documents revealed the Pentagon’s awareness of at least 15 plots by “ISIS
leaders in Afghanistan” targeting “embassies, churches, business centers, and
the FIFA World Cup soccer tournament.” ISIS’s franchising model, which relies
on operatives embedded in their societies all over the globe, enables “ISIS to
overcome obstacles—such as competent security services—and reduce some plot
timelines, minimizing disruption opportunities.” ISIS isn’t the only terrorist
organization developing the capacity to project terrorism abroad, despite the
Taliban’s varying degrees of hostility toward that enterprise. Afghanistan
remains “a place of global significance for terrorism, with approximately 20
terrorist groups operating in the country,” read a 2023 United Nations Sanctions Monitoring Team report on the
country. The Biden administration’s alleged “over-the-horizon” approach to
disrupting these terror networks has not kept pace with the threat, which is now all but
upon us.
“The threat from ISIS,” Director of National Intelligence
Avril Haines testified last month, “remains a significant counterterrorism
concern.” She did, however, stress that the attacks that are “taken on by ISIS”
worldwide are still planned and orchestrated mostly by cells “that are outside
of Afghanistan,” but that’s cold comfort. As the Associated Press reported, “U.S. intelligence agencies had
learned that the group’s branch in Afghanistan was planning an attack in Moscow
and shared the information with Russian officials.” And the Crocus attack may
be just the beginning. As General Michael Kurilla told a House committee last week,
ISIS-K “retains the capability and the will to attack U.S. and Western
interests abroad in as little as six months with little to no warning.”
This is all terribly inconvenient for the targets of
ISIS’s bloodshed. The American government will not be inclined to highlight the
predictable horrors its policies toward Afghanistan have unleashed. Russia
would much prefer to retail fictions that purport to justify the war it is
waging against Ukraine. No one’s political agenda is advanced by the barbarism
in Moscow. But terrorists don’t much care if their brutality is useful.
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