Heightened vigilance needed after IS attack in Moscow

LAST Friday, gunmen in camouflage uniforms stormed a concert hall in Moscow, opened fire at the crowd gathered there and set fire to the place. At least 133 people were reported killed in the deadliest terrorist attack in Russia in almost two decades. President Vladimir Putin announced that all four gunmen who carried out the bloodbath have been arrested and vowed that “all the perpetrators, organizers and those who ordered this crime will be justly and inevitably punished.”

Without mentioning the group responsible for the massacre, Putin said the detained suspects had tried to escape to Ukraine.

It was not surprising for Putin to use the attack to further justify the war Russia is waging to bring the Kyiv government to its knees. What he conveniently left out is that the Islamic State (IS) promptly claimed that it was behind the massacre.

Almost a decade ago, the jihadist group, then known as ISIS, declared the establishment of a caliphate in vast areas of Syria and Iraq. A former affiliate of al-Qaida, IS reaped international outrage for its brutality, filming the beheading of its hostages and enslaving members of the Yazidi minority in Iraq.

At the peak of its power, IS mounted large-scale attacks, mainly in European countries. In 2015, its gunmen and suicide bombers launched simultaneous raids in several Paris suburbs, killing at least 130. Two years later, an IS attack killed 22 people after a concert by Ariana Grande at Manchester Arena in England.

Countries outside the Western sphere were not spared. On Easter Sunday 2019, IS bombed three churches and three hotels in Sri Lanka, killing almost 400 people.

Later that year, airstrikes by a US-led coalition and an offensive by Kurdish fighters in eastern Syria led to the collapse of IS’ caliphate. IS may have been neutralized but not totally defeated. It continues to attract local jihadist groups that now do its bidding. The Moscow attack was carried out by the IS-Khorasan Province, a regional branch active in South-Central Asia.

The ISK-P also set off the bombs that killed 170 Afghans and 13 American troops at Kabul airport at the height of the US’ chaotic pullout from Afghanistan in 2021.

In the Philippines, IS has exploited the lingering jihadist militancy to establish a presence in Mindanao. In 2017, the Maute group, which has sworn allegiance to IS, clashed with government troops in Marawi City, triggering a five-month siege that left most of what was once a tranquil lakeshore community in ruins.

And last December, extremists from the Dawlah Islamiyah, the Arabic term for Islamic State, exploded a bomb at the Mindanao State University in Marawi, killing four people and wounding at least 50 others.

Authorities have since arrested several suspects in the bombing, including the alleged bomb maker. But the arrests have not stopped the Dawlah Islamiyah from stepping up attacks in Mindanao. The most recent was on March 17, when jihadists killed four soldiers in an ambush in Datu Hoffer Ampatuan town, Maguindanao del Sur.

As early as May last year, the military had warned that the Dawlah Islamiyah was massing its forces on the border of Maguindanao del Sur and Cotabato as part of preparations for a wave of terror strikes.

Still, the military was caught off guard by the bombing at the MSU campus, which the Dawlah Islamiyah had been planning for months. Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. considered it a “failure to appreciate intelligence.”

Failure of intelligence, however, is not to blame for the carnage in Moscow. Earlier this month, Washington reportedly shared information with Russian authorities that “extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow.”

In a speech after the Moscow attack, Putin derided the American warnings as resembling “outright blackmail and the intention to intimidate and destabilize our society.”

The Moscow carnage clearly shows that IS is far from being a spent force. Like al-Qaida, it feeds on anti-Muslim sentiments that continue to simmer long after 9/11.

Now more than ever, there is a need for heightened vigilance if Philippine authorities aim to foil IS plans to sow terror in Mindanao.