Among the dynamics highlighted by the March 22 attack at Crocus City Hall, there is this most sinister one: the evidence of a mafia equivalence between the Islamic State (IS) group and the Vladimir regime Poutine. Two mafias at war with each other, two related systems of intimidation through terror and the settling of scores. Without reaching the horror of past videos from the IS group, the explicit images of violence inflicted on the attack suspects after their arrest, broadcast without censorship, relayed a powerful message: not only to the IS group, but to all Russians, ordered to stay in line, under penalty of torture.
For historian Sergei Medvedev, “Russia is a warlike and police power, and always has been,” built on the values of the criminal world. His government has the deepest contempt for human life, he said in The world, and violence today infiltrates all layers of the State. Mr. Medvedev makes extremely grim reading of the nature of Russian power. Mr. Putin accredits him in multiple ways: for having ignored the warning signals launched by Washington regarding the risks of an imminent terrorist attack in Moscow; for making youth the cannon fodder for its aggression against Ukraine; for having affirmed twice more than once that the war would “purify” society.
There is a striking historical parallel to be drawn between Putin’s rise to power in the 2000s and the appearance of the IS group in Iraq at the same time, which occurred amid political upheavals. While a Russian mafia was created, often like Putin from the secret services, around Soviet apparatchiks whose power was shaken by the collapse of the USSR in the 1990s, the IS group was formed around Sunni military elites. driven from power by the de-Baathification led by the Americans after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003. For both, the real or imagined threat represented by the West serves as a fundamental rallying cry. The injunction of allegiance is political for the first, religious for the second. If Putin is ready to recognize that the attack was committed by radical Islamists, he must necessarily, for consistency, integrate into his narrative the idea that its sponsors are the Ukrainian and Western secret services.
What the attack committed by the Islamic State group in Khorasan (EI-K) also sheds light on is the terrorist organization’s capacity to recompose itself, after the disintegration of its “caliphate” in 2019. Jihadist cells have recently been dismantled in Germany, the Netherlands and Austria, but it is especially in Turkey and Russia that EI-K has its branches. Based in the north of Afghanistan, it is made up of numerous small groups of Central Asian nationals, particularly Tajiks, against Moscow for its role in Chechnya, Syria, Mali, etc. The Tajik diaspora in Russia brings together some 2 million people. It is understood that repression will increase against her. Still, occurring so close to Moscow, the attack exposed the vulnerabilities of Putin and his clique of oligarchs in their gang war with the IS group.
Further, this attack highlights a nasty trend towards the “gangsterization” of politics on an international scale.
What do you mean by gangsterization? The political scientist Serge Sur understands it as “the voluntary and organized transgression, by international actors, state or non-state, of national or international rules [y compris en droit humanitaire], for purposes of domination and predation.” According to this broad definition, it is an evil that is not new. Except that it is growing today with the expansion of organized crime and corruption, with the deterioration of the rule of law and growing distrust of institutions. It is a trend fueled by the “autocratization” – according to the formula of the V-Dem Institute, a Swedish think tank – of a world lacking transparency and democratic dialogue.
It is an evil that has long threatened, among others, the Mexican and Colombian democracies, plagued by lawless drug cartels. An evil of which Haiti is a tragic microcosm, with its street gangs which have taken control of Port-au-Prince, backed by opaque political support. It is an evil that is eating away at Israel in its war of conquest against Hamas terrorists. And which is poisoning the United States, with a Donald Trump who normalizes the far right and supremacist militias, who calls for political violence and who publishes on his Truth Social network an image of Joe Biden tied up on the back of a pickup. It is a malignant phenomenon, and globalization prohibits us from thinking that it will remain miraculously contained.