The Birthplace of ISIS: RUSSIA!
When you’ve lived in a place like the Middle East for years you assume that everyone else shares your absorbed knowledge, so it has been days before a strange truth has crept slowly up on me: the mainstream media have not mentioned that Russia is where ISIS started.
I thought everybody knew that.
And ISIS started there because of the very peculiar conditions of post-Soviet empire collapse. The cage doors of dozens of snarling cultures opened at the same time, and great and grievous were the conflicts.
Most people only heard of ISIS a decade ago, for example, when thousands of ISIS fighters flooded into Syria in answer to the call to set up a Muslim state. Though they came from around the world, one country in particular contributed to the army: Russia.
Of the approximately 16,000 ISIS fighters, Russia alone contributed as many as 4,000, according to Putin himself. Most of them came from the North Caucasus.
Yesterday, the global jihad returned to roost, with four ISIS gunmen killing 133 Russians in a theatre in Moscow.
But the fault lines in Russian politics and society have foretold this kind of atrocity for literally centuries.
About one out of every five Russian citizens is Muslim. That population is concentrated both geographically and socially. The lower laboring class in Muslim-centric Central Asia drift into Russian cities in search of jobs. They bring with them the violence of their home region, and have it amplified by the absence of friends and family.
The four alleged perpetrators arrested by Russia are from Tajikistan, a Central Asian republic bordering Afghanistan and a poster boy for Russian ISIS development.
The center of geographic gravity of Islam in Russia in fact is the Northern Caucasus, the site of domestic strife and bloodshed in a series of episodes going back centuries.
Some groups around Dagestan and Chechnya have become proficient guerrilla warriors. They broke out of their homeland in the 1990s and started to export hard-core Islamic principles. They moved from the former Soviet provinces of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan into Afghanistan and Iran, where a different and ‘modern’ form of Islam was worshiped. The warriors of the ISIS Caliphate are old-school Islam; they speak in biblical phrases about smashing heads with rocks, like one would do in the Old Testament (except of course they use the Koran). This is not Al-Qaeda, the earlier group that sprung the 9/11 World Trade Center disaster; Al Qaeda did not structure itself around a geographic goal…no empire on earth would suit them.
For example, ISIS thought the Taliban were back-sliding softies.
Putin tried to suppress them in Chechnya by carpet bombing the region during the Chechen Wars of the 1990s and 2000s. Those wars ended after many years of slaughter with Russian rulership and the installation of micro-Putins, such as Ramzan Kadyrov, so that Moscow could rule Chechnya indirectly.
The problem is that decisive victories are never as decisive as they seem. Most residents of formerly restive regions in the Caucasus enjoy peace as much as anyone. But discontent is easy to detect.
The rise of ISIS was useful for Russia, which could imagine no better destination for its domestic jihadists than a faraway conflict with a conveniently high mortality rate. Anyone so inclined could go to Iraq or Syria with Moscow’s tacit blessing. That is one reason the number of ISIS members coming from Russia was so high: They were more or less permitted to go, so that they would self-detonate or run into machine-gun fire there, rather than make trouble within Russia’s borders.
The hot-point for the development of ISIS in Russia was the Caucasus Emirate.
By late 2015, the militants still operating in Russia’s North Caucasus Republics had largely unified under ISIS’s Caucasus Emirate.
Muslims living in Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Buryatia, and Russians from the most widely differing regions of Russia who have accepted Islam, swore an oath of allegiance to Dokka Umarov as the legitimate leader of the Muslims. He was a Chechen mujahid in North Caucasus. For half a dozen years he headed the movement, before being poisoned in 2013.
But his legend lives on, and the dream of the Caliphate has not died.
Its core is Sharia Law, “the clear, well-trodden path to water”, or the code for living that all Muslims should adhere to. It aims to help Muslims understand how they should lead every aspect of their lives according to God’s wishes. It is stunning to experience as an outsider, when (for instance) a merchant gives you some gold jewelry and urges you to take it out in the street so you can see how the sun makes it gleam. He knows you will bring it back. God is watching. And if that doesn’t work, there are those amputations every Friday morning for the thieves…
And wherever he is — in Moscow, Blagveshchensk, Tyumen — when a Muslim swears the oath to the Caliphate, he becomes a fighting unit. Just because he does not wear a uniform doesn’t mean that he won’t become active in the future.
The Caliphate was supposed to have been eliminated. But in 2023, rumors of resurgence of Caucasus Emirate were spread, and until the attack on the theatre in Moscow, this claim had yet to be confirmed.
I think we can say that Russia’s ISIS problem is back, and is gunning for the man who bombed Chechnya.
Russia has been fertile ground for the continuance of this kind of terrorism because it is itself a terrorist state. The European Parliament officially recognizes Russia as a sponsor of terrorism and has called to bring the Kremlin leaders, including Vladimir Putin, and proxies to the international tribunal and force them to take full responsibility for their actions. Alexander Lukashenko should also be treated as an accomplice in the war of aggression against Ukraine for his role in enabling attacks from the territory of Belarus. The charges name the deaths of more than 8,000 children from Putin’s trademark carpet bombing, and the destruction of thousands of other lives.
Russia has had a terrorist mentality for centuries.
As the modern age began, at around 9:00 A.M. on August 4, 1878, Adjutant General Nikolai Mezentsev, chief of Russia’s gendarmes and head of its secret police, was assassinated in Mikhailovsky Square in St. Petersburg. Coming a little more than six months after Vera Zasulich’s sensational attempt on the life of Petersburg governor-general Fedor Trepov, Mezentsev’s murder was a signal event in the wave of revolutionary terror that convulsed Russia at the end of the 1870s, reaching its zenith in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by members of Narodnaia volia (the People’s Will) on March 1, 1881.
The Russian Socialist Revolutionary (SR) terrorists of the early twentieth century were “fastidious assassins” whose “voluntary assumption of guilt and death” included contempt for their own lives.
During the reign of Trotsky in the early days of the Soviet Union there was a strong impulse to commemorate the martyrs of the revolutionary movement, the terrorists.
The Russian famines of 1921 were only ended with American food…a fact that has slipped the minds of modern Russian historians.
The Russians killed millions of Ukrainians in the Great Famine — Holodomor — in 1932.
Russia has always been a “revolutionary” country. Historically, it moves forward not through evolution, the slow, step-by-step development in which progress occurs over time, but through perpetual revolutions, with their attendant upheavals, crises, and terror.
There has been no consultation with citizens about the rule of law.
It is in this climate that the newly-released nations of Muslims emerged to find their own identity.
A role model was right at hand.
ISIS picked up Russia’s torch of madness and began burning down the world.
That’s the way Putin did it, after all…
Written by Barry Gander
A Canadian from Connecticut: 2 strikes against me! I'm a top writer, looking for the Meaning under the headlines. Follow me on Mastodon @Barry
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