Tuesday, March 26, 2024

The Islamic State’s Terribly Inconvenient Terrorism

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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