{"id":270,"date":"2024-06-26T14:54:55","date_gmt":"2024-06-26T11:54:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/?p=270"},"modified":"2024-07-16T14:58:31","modified_gmt":"2024-07-16T11:58:31","slug":"islamists-feast-as-russias-security-state-slumbers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/new-nobility\/islamists-feast-as-russias-security-state-slumbers\/","title":{"rendered":"Islamists Feast as Russia\u2019s Security State Slumbers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Russia has seen a clear escalation in terrorist attacks this year. In the last three months alone, militant Islamists mounted serious and bloody attacks three times \u2014 at a concert venue<\/a> in Moscow, a prison in Rostov-on-Don, and most recently in two towns in Dagestan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All three were carried out by groups unconnected to one another, but all have something in common; they took Russia\u2019s security services by surprise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The latest attacks in Dagestan, a predominantly Muslim republic in the North Caucasus on June 23 came only a few days after six convicted terrorists<\/a> took guards hostage in a prison of Rostov-on-Don, a city in Southern Russia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Dagestani attack unfolded when several groups of armed men attacked two churches, a synagogue, and a police post in two major cities, Makhachkala and Derbent. The terrorists, bearded men in their late 20s and early 30s, carefully synchronized their assaults and demonstrated some professionalism. They left 20 dead, including 15 policemen and an orthodox priest, 46 wounded, and the synagogue burned down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a result of the police response six gunmen were shot dead and soon identified. Their names provided an unpleasant surprise; all but one were connected to the Dagestani elite, among them two sons and a nephew of a local district head and a cousin of Makhachkala\u2019s former mayor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Local people said the men were known in their community for preaching radical Islam and had provoked conflicts with more moderate Muslims.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bloodshed will do no good for the moderate part of the community, which will now be tarred as compromised because of the elite links of the radicals. Those connections may have insulated the gunmen from pre-emptive action by the security forces. From the counter-terrorist point of view, this fact makes the attacks far more dangerous than a straightforward act of terrorism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All the attacks since April have had new elements. In Moscow, where 145 people died, it was the ethnicity of terrorists \u2014 Russia had not previously witnessed such a large-scale terrorist attack carried out by Islamists from Central Asia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Rostov-on-Don, it was the target that was new \u2014 despite a sizable number of Islamists in the Russian prison population, they had never previously organized a hostage-taking inside a jail. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Dagestan, the novelty was the participation of local elites, the absence of any apparent connection to fighters who had gained experience alongside Islamic State in Syria, and the coordination of more than one attack, which had not been seen since the early 2000s, when Chechen militancy was at its peak.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Russia\u2019s security services have worked for years among Central Asians to head off attacks. The FSB has recruited migrants from those regions in Moscow but also in the regions, including such towns as Omsk, popular among students from the region because of its tech university.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The FSB and the prison service meanwhile invested huge resources in keeping the prison population under control \u2014 we wrote as early as 2009 that the prison service had set up its own, separate system of phone interception in towns with prisons and penal colonies, to prevent inmates from communicating with locals and supporters outside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the FSB has mercilessly persecuted Islamists in Dagestan for decades. The secret services were also well aware that the events in Gaza were radicalizing local Muslims at a dramatic rate \u2014 in October, antisemitic pogroms<\/a> hit Dagestan. That alone should have provided a loud enough wake-up call to those keeping watch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was also clear that Putin\u2019s pro-Hamas rhetoric didn\u2019t make him and the Russian authorities any more sympathetic in the eyes of the radicals in the region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moreover, unlike recent Islamist terrorist attacks in Europe, where terrorists randomly knife passers-by or run them down in cars, every attack in Russia this year showed sophistication in preparation and coordination. It takes time to organize this, thus creating an opportunity for counterterrorism agencies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet, it was an opportunity spurned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why? Because the FSB\u2019s focus is elsewhere. The agency\u2019s priorities come from the agent-in-chief in the Kremlin. Putin and the FSB blamed the Ukrainians and Western intelligence agencies for April\u2019s Crocus music hall massacre, while the FSB is busying itself with a program of domestic repression, adding ever-more activists and artists who object to the Ukraine war to its growing list of so-called terrorists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It may make good regime propaganda, but it leaves real terrorists to exploit the widening vulnerabilities of the Russian state. And that\u2019s costing lives. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Published in CEPA <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Agentura.ru 2024<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yet another bloody terrorist attack has exposed the truth behind Putin\u2019s promises of domestic security \u2014 he can\u2019t deliver.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":271,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-new-nobility"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":272,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270\/revisions\/272"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}