Russia has long worried about terrorism. The Moscow attack showed it may not be prepared.
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Fred Weir Special correspondent
| Moscow
The horrific slaughter at Crocus City Hall, in which gunmen with automatic weapons and explosives killed over 130 people last Friday, has jolted Muscovites out of a sense of complacency that they have enjoyed, despite two years of war in next-door Ukraine.
In , President Vladimir Putin hinted that Ukraine might have been involved in the atrocity.
But he failed to mention a more plausible suspect: the group known as Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K), a sworn enemy of Russia generally associated with the kind of ruthless, face-to-face massacres that occurred in the Moscow concert hall.
Why We Wrote This
While many Russians are trying to link Friday鈥檚 deadly terrorist attack to Kyiv, the more likely suspect is an older enemy: radical Islamists. Russia has diverted attention from them amid its war with Ukraine.
The four prime suspects, who fled the scene in a car, were apprehended in Russia鈥檚 southwestern Bryansk region, near the borders with Ukraine and Belarus. On Sunday night, the suspects, who are from the former Soviet central Asian state of Tajikistan, were hauled before a Moscow court聽鈥� all of them very badly beaten聽鈥� and charged with terrorism, with a trial date set for late May.
While many Russians seem eager to embrace a Ukrainian connection to the attack, it looks like exactly the sort of threat emanating from Afghanistan that Russian security experts have been warning about for years.
The ISIS-K group is dedicated to creating a caliphate in the former Khorasan region of central Asia, which stretches from Iran to Tajikstan and includes parts of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, as well as all of Afghanistan. With Afghanistan once again under Taliban rule, the group has been moving into neighboring former Soviet states and infiltrating Russia through the stream of migrant workers, many of them Tajiks, who keep Russia鈥檚 construction and service industries running. Statistics are unreliable, but it鈥檚 estimated that are currently in Russia, many of them in Moscow, and are relatively free to move around.
In early March that ISIS was preparing an attack, and specifically mentioned a concert venue. Mr. Putin rejected the warning as a 鈥減rovocation,鈥� saying 鈥渢hese actions resemble outright blackmail and the intention to intimidate and destabilize our society.鈥�
But, in fact, the Russians were already aware of the threat from ISIS. In early March, the Federal Security Service claimed to have near Moscow that was planning to bomb a Russian synagogue.
Now, experts say, the attack will almost certainly lead to tough security measures and stepped-up surveillance that the city hasn鈥檛 seen since a wave of terrorist attacks more than 20 years ago.
鈥淭here are so many questions and very few answers鈥� about the Crocus City Hall attack, says Alexei Kondaurov, a former Duma deputy and former KGB major general specializing in anti-terrorist operations. 鈥淎ny terrorist attack that isn鈥檛 caught at the stage of preparation represents a failure of special services. You can speak of solving 99% of crimes, but if one is not prevented, there is no justification. Particularly when the number of casualties is so high.鈥�
A threat from Afghanistan
In the 1990s, Afghanistan under the Taliban was a haven and incubator of various extreme Islamist groups聽鈥� such as Al Qaeda聽鈥� who exported Islamist insurgencies to Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and beyond.
After NATO occupied Afghanistan and Russia put down its own Islamist rebellion in Chechnya, things stabilized. The mass-scale terrorist attacks that had hit Moscow and other parts of Russia during the Chechen wars receded. But experts say the danger never completely went away.
Russia鈥檚 military intervention in Syria in 2015 again pitted Moscow against Islamist groups, and a planeload of Russian tourists was destroyed, , over Egypt鈥檚 Sinai Desert that year, killing 224 people.
鈥淲hat happened in that Moscow concert hall was a terrible tragedy,鈥� says Grigory Shvedov, editor of , an independent online journal that reports on Russia鈥檚 mainly Muslim Caucasus region. 鈥淏ut, cynically speaking, it will be seen by some as an effective example and could revive this kind of extremism鈥� within Russia, which has a very large Indigenous Muslim population.
The threat from ISIS-K, which is based in Afghanistan and Pakistan, is particularly acute for Moscow, due to the Russian economy鈥檚 reliance on migrant labor from central Asia. Afghan ethnic groups include Uzbeks and Tajiks, who may move easily into the neighboring states and then join the stream of migrant workers into Russia, as the four alleged Crocus City Hall attackers appear to have done.
Once in Russia, migrant workers may be subject to police harassment and extortion, but actual security measures that might prevent terrorist attacks are sorely lacking. Mr. Shvedov gives the example of dozens of illegal hostels, whose existence is an open secret in Moscow. Migrants live there without observing the requirement to register with authorities.
鈥淭he rules exist, but realities are very different,鈥� he says, alluding to pervasive corruption in the system.
Consequences from Crocus City Hall
Depending on whom Russia officially decides to blame for the calamity, the terrorist attack may further sour relations with the U.S. Alternatively, it may improve them if the two adversaries acknowledge that they have a dangerous common enemy in ISIS.
At home, Russians will likely face the security crackdown that, ironically, they have largely avoided over two years of war in Ukraine. That would mean a further tightening of the screws on speech and make it much harder to use public transportation or gather in large groups. Communities of migrant workers will likely face a real crackdown.
鈥淚 expect more repression, inside the country and outside, and a new level of brutality,鈥� says Andrei Soldatov, a Russian security services expert who is presently a senior fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington. 鈥淲e鈥檝e seen it before聽鈥� the tactics once adopted to deal with terrorists became quickly accepted as a new norm to treat political dissent.
鈥淭hus the torture the Russian security services used against four suspects might be used against all sort of people in the country. This is the most direct consequence of the attack.鈥�
