Putin’s war on Ukraine leaves Russia vulnerable to ISIS attacks

Putin’s Russia and Islamist groups have a long history.

After Friday’s horrific attack at a Moscow concert, it seemed to some that Putin was reaping the consequences – although as always, it was ordinary Russians who were paying the price for his misadventures abroad.

his regime broken Chechen separatists from 1999 to 2009 and beyond.Recently, Putin’s government has continued low-intensity counterinsurgency activities in the South Caucasus, e.g. ingushetia.

Russia has blown thousands of ISIS fighters to smithereens in an effort to support the Assad regime in the Syrian civil war.

While Russia is keen to implicate Ukraine in the Moscow terror attack, there appears to be no reason to doubt the Islamic State’s claim that it is responsible for the atrocity.

Ironically, Putin’s brutal and absurd war on Ukraine appears to have distracted Russian security forces from the real threat: that of Islamic terrorism.

according to a 2017 report The Soufan Center, which studies violent extremism, shows more foreign fighters joining the Islamic State in the former Soviet republics than in any other region. In 2015, militants from Russia’s provinces and republics pledged allegiance to the group.

ISIS has carried out other major attacks against Russian interests abroad: In 2015, a Russian plane carrying 224 people exploded Over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, all people on board were killed. The local Islamic State affiliate also claimed responsibility for the attack.

U.S. officials say recent intelligence reports indicate Islamic State Afghanistan and Pakistan branchKnown as “Islamic State Khorasan” or “Isis-K”, it is active in Russia.

Isis-K was formed by disaffected members in 2015, when the Pakistani Taliban was at the height of the Islamic State’s power in Iraq and Syria, before a U.S.-led campaign all but destroyed the self-proclaimed caliphate.

Earlier this month, the Russian news agency TASS report The FSB foiled an attack by the Islamic State group on a Moscow synagogue, so Russia knew they were active.

Why did Putin, the tough guy and self-proclaimed protector of Mother Russia, wait until the next day to comment on the concert hall massacre?

Embarrassment might be one explanation. Several Western embassies have warned Moscow of imminent Islamist attacks.

“The regime exposed its vulnerabilities in such critical situations, just as it did during Prigozhin’s rebellion,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia-Eurasia Center. And then, as Same as this weekend’s event, Putin did not show up for hours before finally resolving the emergency. “In difficult moments, Putin always disappears,” Kolesnikov said in Washington post.

When Putin finally showed up, he was in full snarling sociopath mode. He made no mention of his police state’s apparent failure to stop the attacks, Killed at least 137 peopleDespite the clear warning issued by the United States on March 7.

Putin did not mention Islamic State, the group that claimed the attack, but he was quick to implicate Ukraine with little or no evidence. Putin, despite his own faults, will seek any political or propaganda advantage from the massacre to further his jihad against his neighbors.

Not all Russians believe Putin’s message. Many on social media were quick to criticize the authorities for their poor response to the concert hall attack; if any of them had arrived in central Moscow and unfurled a pro-democracy banner, they would have been met with rugby by security officials within minutes style siege. Why did it take the National Guard more than an hour to arrive at the Crocus Hall grounds, just two miles from the base?

Inevitably, some conspiracy theories are circulating. Could this massacre be a false flag operation like the 1999 Moscow apartment bombing? These were officially declared the work of Chechen separatists, allowing Putin to launch a second Chechen war, a conflict that cemented his popularity among many Russians.

It seems more likely that the Islamic State group was responsible for the atrocity, given warnings from Western countries ahead of Friday’s attack and evidence of Islamic State activity in Russia in recent months.

As much as Putin wants to implicate Kiev, all evidence suggests that he has been looking for an imaginary enemy in terms of threats to Russia’s national security, and entirely in the wrong direction.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said Saturday night as he prepared to respond to the latest death and destruction in Moscow that “instead of caring about his own Russian citizens and speaking to them, poor Putin spent a day in silence, thinking How to connect this to Ukraine.” Missiles rained down on his country: the enemy did not.