If IS-K (Islamic State-Khorasan) really did strike Moscow this week – and it has hit concerts and football matches in Europe before – then we’re likely to get to WW3 far more quickly than the Ukraine war would have got us there.

Here’s how.

It is, of course, entirely plausible that remnants of the ISIS old guard, whose leadership wouldn’t have been smashed so thoroughly if the Russians hadn’t helped in the Syrian civil war, decided to exact some revenge for their lost dream.

After all, it was the Russians that destroyed the Raqqa branch of the Mosul caliphate; heaven on earth for Abu Bakar al Baghdadi’s head chopping, gut eating, Shi’a killing Wahabi mercenaries who were paid in Uncle Sam’s greenback even as they publicly rubbished America’s failed Iraq invasion to beef up their radical support base.

But they’d still need to be armed and funded from somewhere to make what is plausible also possible. Notice what Putin said when the Americans told him that IS-K was behind the Moscow attack.

“We’re interested in who ordered it,” the strongman told his national security cabinet. That’s because intelligence agencies don’t worry about what insurgents/militias do as much as who made them do it. In other words, who trained, funded and armed them to carry out carefully camouflaged strikes in other countries.

Information about who really controlled the likes of ISIS and al Qaeda, especially when things got really out of control in Iraq, took its sweet time to come out. And even though a certain Donald Trump cited government documents when he accused one Hilary Clinton of arming and funding ISIS in Iraq, the link became clear enough when the Obama White House – Hilary was secretary of state, remember? – hijacked the so-called Arab Spring, replacing public fury with militia violence in one great push to cleanse the Middle East of all its irritants.

So was born Obama’s “leading from behind” idiocy, arming Saudi funded ISIS/al Qaeda hordes who hunted, sodomised (with a bayonet), and shot Qaddafi before turning their fury to Bashar al Assad in Damascus.

The story got a little complicated here. Syria didn’t have Libya’s oil, but it was a central part of an axis that gave nightmares to Washington’s two closest regional allies. Anything that would benefit Iran-Syria-Hezbollah (Lebanon), the so-called Shi’a arc, was simply unacceptable for the Sunni alliance, six GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) countries and their friend, Turkey, on the edge of Europe.

Add Hamas and the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah-Hamas grouping is also the only traditional resistance to Israel’s illegal occupation and equally illegal expansion of its settlements. Therefore, by the time civil war came to Syria, ISIS suicide bombers were getting money and weapons from the US, all of EU, all of GCC, and also Turkey (possibly also Israel). Even old time Middle East correspondents like Robert Fisk, who always said that the House of Assad had its claws buried too deep in the soil of Syria to be dislodged, began having doubts.

But then Bashar al Assad worked out a deal with Iran and Russia. The Pasdaran provided boots on the ground and Russian bombers helped from the sky. This was the time when Turkey shot down a Russian plane to try to draw Nato into the mix, only for Erdogan to rush to Moscow later to thank Putin for the warning about the 2016 failed coup.

So, while Syria suffered, it didn’t burn like Iraq and Libya, and Bashar al Assad is still firmly in the seat; thanks to Putin. And ISIS faded away from the Middle East theatre only to reappear in Afghanistan just when – coincidence of coincidences – the Taliban were on their way back to Kabul and Washington knew the long, ugly war on terror’s days were numbered. Yet while everybody accepted that IS-K now presented the last remaining threat to the Taliban, nobody wondered, much less explained, their source(s) of funds and arms.

The Russians know, of course, just who pulled IS’s strings when its bombers flattened them on the ground in the Levant. Now they’re wondering what suddenly brought it out of the cold to strike in the heart of Moscow just when the Ukraine war has gone terribly off-script for Nato. Hence the reference to Ukraine that the western press is going crazy about. Even the Guardian called it “shameless opportunism” in its editorial the other day.

Russia is bent upon treating the Moscow attack as its own 9/11. And it will not be too hard to get to the bottom of “who ordered it”. We know that a lot changed in the Middle East since the Syrian war. Iran and Saudi Arabia buried the hatchet, both GCC and OIC made up with Damascus, and all parties promised to end proxy wars. But the Americans never accepted nor distanced themselves from their old ways and their old henchmen.

If, indeed, Russian fears prove true, then maybe it is Washington that has over-extended, not Moscow.

Time will tell.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024