Unlike Madrid that 11-M, Moscow does not discuss who the material authors of the latest massacre are. All of them – all Tajiks – have been captured. But the pointing out of intellectual authorship promises to become a new war within the war.
So much so that the Islamic State (IS) has claimed responsibility for the attack through its usual channels. So much so that the first statements, at the point of a gun, of the terrorists, can square with the jihadist inspiration (although even more so with the hardship and lack of scruples).
Friday night’s attack, due to its devastating impact, has the potential to be a shocker for Russian society, as was the one – no less discussed – that a quarter of a century ago left three hundred dead in blocks of flats in Moscow, prompting Putin to declare a second Chechen war.
The fact that the Islamic State launched a large-scale attack against Russia, two months after attacking Iran and without giving respite to the Taliban in Afghanistan, may attract attention. But it also has an explanation, within its fixations.
In the same way, Tajik authorship is less far-fetched than it seems, given the vicissitudes of political Islam in this republic – allied to Moscow -, its flare-up in Syria and its return to the underground in 2016.
Officials of the United States Department of State give full credit to the authorship of the Islamic State, and even go further than the statement and specify that it would have been the Khorassan branch of IS.
But Putin’s enemies should not rush to feel free of guilt, if it is confirmed that it was the Islamic State.
Moscow already revealed IS’s animosity a fortnight ago, claiming that it had thwarted the organization’s plans to attack a synagogue. That same day, the US embassy called on its citizens to avoid crowds and concerts.
Apparently, some of the terrorists would have passed through Istanbul this month. Symptom at times of unconfessable links with the jihadist international in neighboring Syria. At the height of the failed campaign to topple Moscow’s ally Baixar al-Assad, there were 300 fighters from Tajikistan in the ranks of the Islamic State. The ghostly caliph of IS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, even appointed a Tajik as the emir of Al-Raqqa.
Then the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan was still legal and even had its lawyers in the West, as an alternative to the pro-Russian regime. Not much attention was paid to the jihadism of its leaders, with a founder friend of Bin Laden and defender of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the nucleus of the Islamic State in Afghanistan.
For years, the only thing that has shaken the Taliban’s control of Afghanistan are the IS attacks, the latest on Thursday in their stronghold of Kandahar. In their counter-terrorist operations, the Taliban claim that more and more Tajiks are being killed.
Since the Tajiks speak Persian – both in their republic and in Afghanistan, where they were the minority that supported the US occupation – they also represent a golden opportunity for IS to strike back at Iran.
Not surprisingly, the Revolutionary Guards and their Shiite Lebanese and Iraqi allies played a notable role in the defeat of IS in Syria. That is why it is not so strange that on January 3, in Kerman, IS broke up the celebration of the martyrdom of General Qassem Soleimani, killing 94 people. The suicide bomber was also a Tajik. And IS said it had done it “for Palestine”.
This was not the case when he attacked seven Western cyclists in Tajikistan in 2018, killing four of them.
In Idlib, Turkey is holding back jihadists who would want to provoke Russian forces in Syria. To do this, Abdul Hakim al-Xixani’s Chechens, who fought with the Al-Qaeda affiliate, enlisted in Zelenski’s foreign legion.
The one who was head of the special forces of Tajikistan, Colonel Gulmurod Khalimov, with five courses in charge of the State Department, reappeared one day as the head of IS in Syria, that bell tower of Sau that few people get say where it comes from
