Unlike Madrid on March 11, Moscow does not discuss who the material authors of the last massacre are. All of them – all Tajiks – have been captured, but the accusation of intellectual authorship promises to become a new war within a war.

It matters little that the Islamic State (IS) has claimed responsibility for the attack through its usual channels. It matters little that the first statements, at gunpoint, by the terrorists, may fit with jihadist inspiration (although even more so with penury and lack of scruples).

The attack on Friday night, due to its horrifying balance, has the potential to be a shock to Russian society, as was the one – no less discussed – that a quarter of a century ago left three hundred dead in apartment blocks in Moscow, opening the door for Putin to declare the second war in Chechnya.

That the Islamic State attacks Russia on a large scale, two months after hitting Iran and without giving a truce to the Taliban in Afghanistan, may attract attention. But it also has an explanation, within its fixations.

Likewise, Tajik authorship is less far-fetched than it seems, in light of the vicissitudes of political Islam in that republic – an ally of Moscow –, its experience in Syria and its return to hiding in 2016.

US State Department officials give full credit to the authorship of the Islamic State, even going beyond the statement, specifying that it would have been the Khorasan branch of the ISIS.

But Putin’s enemies should not rush to feel blameless if it is confirmed to have been the Islamic State.

Moscow already revealed the animosity of IS a fortnight ago, stating 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 had passed through Istanbul this month, a sometimes symptom of unspeakable links with the jihadist international in neighboring Syria. At the height of the failed campaign to overthrow Moscow’s ally Bashar al-Assad, there were 300 Tajik fighters in IS’s ranks. The ghostly caliph of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al Bagdadi, even appointed a Tajik as emir of Raqa.

At that time, 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. It tiptoed over the jihadism of its leaders, with a founder who was a friend of Bin Laden and defender of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the core of IS in Afghanistan.

For years, the only thing that has shaken Taliban control of Afghanistan are the IS attacks, the latest on Thursday in its stronghold of Kandahar. In their counterterrorist operations, the Taliban claim that more and more Tajiks are falling.

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 the Islamic State to strike back at Iran.

Not in vain, the Revolutionary Guards and their Lebanese and Iraqi Shia 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 Qasem Soleimani, leaving 94 dead. The suicide bomber was also Tajik. And ISIS said it was doing it “for Palestine.”

Not so when, in 2018, he attacked seven Western cyclists in Tajikistan, killing four.

In Idlib, Turkey stops jihadists who would want to provoke Russian forces in Syria. To do so, Abdul Hakim al Shishani’s Chechens, who fought alongside the Al Qaeda affiliate, enlisted in Zelensky’s Foreign Legion.

The former head of Tajikistan’s special forces, Colonel Gulmurod Jalimov, with five courses in charge of the State Department, reappeared one day as the gyrfalcon in Syria of the IS, that Guadiana that few can say where he was born.