Who led Islamic State terrorists to Moscow? Hitler, Stalin, CIA all helped pave the road

After Islamic State-linked terrorists slaughtered over a hundred people at Moscow’s Crocus Theatre last week, Putin alleged that the West had pulled the strings.

Visual of the explosion at Moscow concert hall | Photo credit: Reuters

Emblazoned with an outline of the Chah-i-Zindeh mosque in Samarkand, built by the conqueror Timur the Lame, the badges on the shoulders of the men at the prison camp in Eastern Prussia bore the words Biz Alla Bilen, ‘God is with us’. These soldiers of the Third Reich hoped to march to a different destiny. “You are the foundation of the Eastern Legions,” the Uzbek schoolteacher-turned-Nazi political officer Beymirza Hayit told them. “One day, when the eastern countries are free, you will be the backbone of the homeland.”

Last week, as Islamic State-linked jihadists slaughtered over a hundred people at the Crocus Theatre in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin alleged the West pulled the strings behind the hands curled around their Kalashnikovs. The claim was deeply disingenuous, intended to deflect blame—but it has illuminated a savage, little-known war that has run for over a century.

For more than two years, jihadists drawn from Ajnad al-Kavkaz—part of Al-Nusra, Al-Qaeda’s front organisation in Syria—have been fighting Russia alongside Ukrainian forces. Led by Rustam Azhiev, the jihadists hope the war will lead to the liberation of their homeland in the North Caucasus, Chechnya. Ever since the destruction of the Islamic State’s so-called caliphate in 2016, numbers of Central Asian jihadists also resettled in Ukraine, including the group’s deputy minister for war, Caesar Tokhosashvili.

The improbable entanglement of jihadism in the Ukraine-Russia war is the outcome of a tortured history, in which the Nazi Führer Adolf Hitler, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) all played a part.

Empires, slave-traders and civilisations

Even as the second Chechen War raged in 1999, reducing the city of Grozny to rubble, Putin angrily declared: “Russia is really standing at the forefront of the war against international terrorism. And Europe ought to fall on its knees and express its great thankfulness that we, unfortunately, are fighting it alone.” The anger was understandable. The United States was engaged in cultivating the Taliban, hoping to expand its leverage in energy-rich Central Asia.

For centuries, the Tartar and Nogai raiders had pillaged the agricultural lands of Eastern Europe in search of slaves: Two million people, historian Dariusz Kolodziejczyk has estimated, were taken from the kingdoms of Muscovy and Poland-Lithuania from 1500-1700 alone. The slave trade provided the economic foundations for the emergence of the ethnic-Turkic regions of Central Asia as centres of civilisation. Even though the slaves—unlike Africans trafficked to the Americas—were integrated into Ottoman society within a generation or two, the raids left deep traumas in their homelands.

Late in the 19th century, though, the wheel of history turned. The Russian empire pushed eastwards through the Crimea, capturing the homelands of the Chechens, Ingush and Dagestanis. Further east, the Khanates of Khiva and Khokand, the Emirate of Bokhara and the Tartar raiding centre of Geok-Tepe, were seized in a lightning campaign that began in 1865. The Khanate of Merv fell without a shot being fired.

Imperial Russia’s efforts to restrict the influence of Islam, by limiting the numbers of Haj pilgrims and choking religious tithes and endowments, provoked multiple rebellions, historian Martha Olcott has recorded. Then the cotton trade collapsed during the First World War, together with the empires of Moscow and Istanbul. This led to a region-wide insurrection, led by the Turkish revolutionary Ismail Enver.

Ferghana—a valley at the intersection of what is now eastern Uzbekistan, southern Kyrgyzstan and northern Tajikistan—also saw multiple uprisings, often spearheaded by clerics of its powerful Sufi brotherhoods, historian Beatrice Manz has written.

Following his rise to power in 1924, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin stamped out these rebellions, imposing the collectivisation of lands, arresting clerics and shutting down religious institutions. To the Soviet ideologue Liutsian Klimovich, Islam was an enemy to be crushed, “‘an anti-scientific, reactionary world concept, alien and inimical to [the] scientific Marxist-Leninist concept”.

The CIA’s jihadists

Like the Nazi Waffen-Schutzstaffel divisions they fought alongside, the Muslim legions raised to fight the Soviet Union faced crushing defeat, historian Jonathan Trigg has written. Those they hoped to liberate paid the price. In the summer of 1944, Crimea’s Tatars were collectively rounded up by the Soviet secret police, accused of Nazi collaboration and deported to Central Asia. Thousands died during their long journey east in airless, sealed cattle wagons, and thousands more succumbed to malnutrition and disease in collective farms and Gulags.

As this genocide unfolded, journalist Ian Johnson revealed, the US and the United Kingdom had already begun recruiting the remnants of the Muslim legion, hoping to use them against the Soviet Union. Gerhard von Mende, the Nazi bureaucrat in charge of the legions, and his Uzbek protégé Vali Kayum Khan emerged at the centre of this new Cold War covert operation.

Despite his role as a high-ranking Nazi official, Johnson records, Von Mende was soon living a lavish life in post-war West Germany—complete with a house, a car, a maid and even a horse—despite having no ostensible source of income. Efforts to stage operations using the Central Asians, though, were betrayed by Soviet spies in West Germany, as well as the UK.

Egyptian Islamist leader Said Ramadan emerged as a key figure in subsequent efforts to recruit Islam as a weapon against communism. Late in 1953, Ramadan met with US President Dwight Eisenhower as part of a delegation of anti-communist Islamic clerics. The next year, he was granted asylum in Germany, escaping a crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood by Egypt’s secular government.

French journalist Caroline Fourest has noted that Ramadan emerged at the vanguard of Islamist causes worldwide. In Pakistan, Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan wrote the preface to one of Ramadan’s books and gave him a slot on national radio. Ramadan became a close friend of the ideologue Abul A’la Mawdudi, among the principal theoreticians of the idea of the Islamic State. Leading a mosque set up in Munich as a hub for the European operations of the Muslim Brotherhood, scholar Giles Kepel records, Ramadan emerged as a hub linking rich Middle-East donors with Islamist causes.

The fires the CIA hoped to ignite would finally catch light in 1979 when the long jihad began in Afghanistan.

The war without an end

For the third time in a century, Russia found itself at war with its restive Muslim nationalities, this time fighting against Chechens like Shamil Basayev, who had learned their craft from al-Qaeda and the Afghan mujahideen. Following a disastrous campaign against the jihadists in 1994-1996, Putin went to war in Chechnya again in 1999-2004. Large-scale terrorism followed the brutal Russian offensive; jihadists killed 334 people, including 186 school-children, in the village of Beslan, following that up with suicide bombings in several cities.

The Ferghana valley also saw intense jihadist violence, with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan battling the regime of dictator Islam Karimov in the 1990s. Tajikistan saw civil war from 1992-1997. There was sporadic terrorist violence in southern Kyrgyzstan, too.

Following the military defeat of these movements, thousands of Central Asian and North Caucasus jihadists drifted to Syria, joining al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. There, they were joined by jihadists. The Russian-speaking jihadists, scholar Caleb Weiss notes, played a key role in fighting both the Syrian government and the Russian military forces who intervened to prop it up. The destruction of the caliphate, though, again left them without a homeland.

In 2016, Ukraine’s domestic intelligence service, journalists Pawel Pieniazek and Alyona Savchuk reported, made 46 arrests linked to international terrorist groups, who had used dozens of crossing points to locate themselves in Kyiv and Kharkiv. Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan citizens held last year for plotting Islamic State attacks in Germany and the Netherlands, Nurbek Bekmurzaev writes, had used Ukraine as a transit point to make claims for asylum in Europe.

From history, Putin has learned that geopolitics knows few moral qualms: Like it did after 1945, he fears, the West might use Islamist terror groups as a tool in the New Cold War. The Russian president’s handling of jihadist groups in the region hasn’t been without opportunism, either. Long before the fall of Kabul, Russia cultivated a partnership with the Afghan Taliban, hoping to put pressure on the US and secure its flanks against the Islamic State.

The road leading to the Crocus Theatre led past many blood-soaked landmarks, each evidence of the cynicism of great powers, and their short-sighted failure to address the festering resentments. Even today, as Russia and the West face common threats from jihadists, there’s little hope they’ll make common cause against it.

Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.

(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)