On March 23, four gunmen burst into the Crocus City Hall theater on the outskirts of Moscow and shot concertgoers, killing at least 137 people with many more injured. The attackers were armed with automatic rifles and set fire to some emergency stairwells, blocking escape routes. White House spokesperson John Kirby, who viewed a video of the massacre not long after, said “The images are just horrible and just hard to watch.”
Previously, on March 5, the United States had issued a warning via its Moscow Embassy about the possibility of a terrorist attack. Russian President Vladimir Putin responded by brushing off the warnings, saying it was an “attempt to scare and intimidate our society.”
ISIS-K claimed responsibility for the attack through their Telegram account. ISIS-K is an offshoot of the Islamic State, which seeks to establish a Muslim caliphate across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. ISIS has not forgotten that many of their fighters were killed by Russian forces in Syria. As recently as 2017, a ISIS suicide bomber killed 15 Russian citizens in a St. Petersburg metro subway.
Four citizens of Tajikistan have been arrested. Tajikistan is a poor landlocked Muslim country that relies on Russia for its income. The Tajiks appear to be wearing the same clothing as worn by the attackers seen in the theatre, in an earlier photograph released by ISIS. One appears to have been mutilated by one of the Russian soldiers, reported to be members of a neo-Nazi paramilitary group.
The attackers were caught in a forest near the border with Belarus — not trying to enter Ukraine, as claimed by Putin. The white Renault car that was driving away from the theatre is also pictured. One of men claimed, in broken Russia, to have carried out the attacks “for money.” He claimed they were promised 500,000 rubles — about $5,400. Of course, “confessions” made under duress and torture are problematic.
Many Tajiks have been tricked into joining the Russian army, and are used as cannon fodder in the Ukraine war. Central Asian immigrants to Russia are being forcibly conscripted. And Putin craftily and cynically sacrifices Russian troops from Dagestan, Siberia and Tatarstan, rather than his Moscow powerbase.
Dagestan recruits are being killed in Ukraine at a disproportionate rate. However, the potential for dissent in Dagestan and other areas of the Caucasus isn’t solely about those who have been killed in Ukraine. Protest has been brewing in Dagestan for a long time; it’s just that any sign of protest has been brutally repressed. The same applies to the other republics in the North Caucasus: Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachay-Cherkessia, Ingushetia and Chechnya.
Putin has been waging a war with Muslim Chechens for decades. From 1999 to 2009 more than 60,000 combatants and noncombatants were killed in Chechnya. In retaliation, Chechens carried out a terrorist attack on a Russian school in 2004, resulting in the deaths of 330 people, most of them children.
There are approximately 20 million Muslims in Russia — about 14 percent of the total population. The Economist created a chart that shows how Putin has been relying on conscripts from poor and remote areas of the country, that are predominantly Muslim, for quite a while. Molfar, an open-source intelligence-gathering group, goes as far as describing this as a form of ethnic cleansing. Many of these people are vulnerable to the radical Salafi teachings of ISIS.
Now, after years of brutality, co-option and suppression against Muslims, Putin is sitting on a powder keg of his own making.
Patrick Drennan is a journalist based in New Zealand, with a degree in American history and economics.
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