Massacre in Moscow and ISIS
It now seems beyond any doubt that the massacre at the Moscow concert was the
work of ISIS, both in terms of the method of the attack, the explicit claim of
responsibility, and the capture of the perpetrators. However, Putin is trying to
blame the Ukrainians for complicity, which is highly unlikely. Even if there
were some external complicity, the action must certainly be attributed to ISIS.
But what is ISIS? It has been destroyed for many years, its caliph killed by an
American commando, its surviving fighters scattered, and it has lost all control
of territory and organization: therefore, it no longer exists. Yet, it is also
said that ISIS still exists and has never truly been defeated. In essence, both
statements are true when clarified in their context. In reality, ISIS no longer
exists as an organization or entity but remains as a label adopted by a
scattered myriad of Islamic extremists in various parts of the Islamic world,
from Central Asia to sub-Saharan Africa; some describe it as a kind of
franchising.
Let's briefly examine the events.
ISIS emerged as a fundamentalist movement in war-torn Syria and gained global
attention when it unified parts of Syria and Iraq into a single political entity.
Its official name in Arabic was al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi Iraq wa ash Sham,
literally translating to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. The term "al-Sham"
referred to the Arab lands on the eastern Mediterranean, currently corresponding
to the states of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and even Palestine, akin to the ancient
Italian term "levante" which referred to the same regions. Translated into
English, this expression becomes the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, hence
the acronym ISIS.
The operation's goal was the unification of dar al-Islam (lands of faith) as
opposed to dar al-harby (lands of war or conquest). According to Islamic
tradition, the entire Ummah (community of believers) was to be governed by a
single authority, the caliph (successor of Muhammad). In fact, caliphs led the
entire community of believers, and even when multiple independent Islamic states
were established, they retained an ideal role similar to medieval Christian
emperors vis-à-vis Christian kingdoms. The caliphate, eventually passing to the
Turkish sultan, was abolished in 1924 during Kemal Ataturk's secular revolution.
Today, the caliph is supposed to unite all Muslims, transcending factions,
nationalism, and divisions to create a single Islamic state.
A few months later, a caliph was proclaimed within ISIS in the person of Ibrahim
al-Badri, assuming the grandiose name Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi: Abu Bakr being the
name of the first caliph and Baghdadi meaning "from Baghdad," where he was
culturally nurtured. The proclamation of a virtually unknown figure as caliph
was entirely outside the traditions, but it was asserted that the victories of
the caliphate (the Islamic state) would manifest Allah's blessing and hence its
legitimacy.
Indeed, the proclamation of the Islamic Caliphate was swift, with the almost
effortless occupation of vast areas of Syria and Iraq, including the major city
of Mosul with 700,000 inhabitants.
Volunteers (foreign fighters) flocked from all over, not only from the Islamic
world but also from the West, much to the amazement and fear of Westerners. They
never quite understood jihadism, always perceiving it as a phenomenon of
backwardness or madness that could only infect minds of backward peoples, yet
they were horrified to see it revived among the third generations of immigrants,
people born, raised, and educated in the West.
Jihadism had a long history, climaxing with the 9/11 attacks. However, until
then, it had always been terrorist groups without governing responsibilities.
Now, they had territory to administer, effectively creating a genuine Islamic
state, albeit unrecognized internationally.
The Caliphate emerged in a power vacuum without forces capable of effectively
opposing it. The Syrian part was engulfed in a ferocious, senseless, and endless
civil war, with territory controlled by disordered groups or rather bands,
engaged in a mad struggle of all against all. The Iraqi part was embroiled in a
frenzied ethnic-religious conflict: Iraq's Shiite majority, historically
oppressed by the Sunni minority, had seized power through the democratic
universal suffrage imprudently imposed by the Americans and now dominated the
Sunnis in turn. The lightning rise of the Caliphate was thus due to the endless,
inextricable conflict of the Middle East, everyone against everyone. Success was
attributed to God's will rather than exceptional conditions, fueling even more
fanatical extremism.
They then lost all sense of limits and reality, antagonizing everyone and
everything. Christians, Yazidis, Shiites, and every other minority were brutally
persecuted, clashes erupted with the bellicose Kurds supported by the Americans,
and attacks were carried out everywhere, even in countries that could
potentially support them, like Turkey and Afghanistan.
If its rise was rapid, its decline and downfall were prolonged. The protracted
duration of its decline was due to the same reasons as its swift rise: the state
of chaos, the struggle of all against all that unfortunately characterizes those
lands. Kurds, Turks, Shiites, Sunnis, moderate and extremist Islamists,
adherents of various tendencies, all fought among themselves, with temporary
enemies becoming allies only to revert to enemies moments later, with external
interventions from Americans and Russians (the Chinese still remain aloof). The
war against the Caliphate was thus waged by all, yet at the same time, everyone
was in conflict and suspicion with each other. The Caliphate's excesses led its
adherents to victory or death without any prospect of mediation.
The end of the Caliphate does not mean the end of jihadism, which has continued
and will continue for an unpredictable time.
While the Caliphate (ISIS) no longer exists, the term has survived as a kind of
franchising adopted by scattered groups within the vast world of Islamic
extremism and fundamentalism.
There is no strategy, no concrete recognizable purpose, but terrorism strikes
everywhere. A bloody attack like the one in Moscow happened a few months ago in
Iran because it is Shiite, and some years ago at Kabul airport because,
unbelievably, even the Taliban did not appear extremist enough. The same occurs
in sub-Saharan Africa, in Nigeria. Smaller-scale attacks are reported everywhere,
hundreds of them, usually barely noticed by the international media.
Defeated and destroyed, the Caliphate, like al-Qaeda, leaves behind scattered,
frenzied cells that can strike anywhere. In fact, it is very difficult, even
impossible, to predict their actions precisely because they are irrational,
random, and for the same reason, they no longer pose a political threat. It is
no longer conceivable that a new Caliphate, a new fundamentalist political
entity, as feared in previous decades, could truly emerge. There will never be a
war of all Islam against the West as bin Laden dreamed, there will never be a
single state unifying all of Islam, there will never be a theocracy as Khomeini
dreamed: they are all dreams ending in a lake of blood and a heap of ruins due
to internal conflicts within the Islamic world itself rather than a clash with
the West.