Joint statement by LCFI (Great Britain, Argentina & Brazil), classconcsious.org and the National Democratic Peoples Front / NDPF (India)
The attack on the Crocus City Hall in Krasnogorsk, on the outskirts of Moscow, on 22nd May was clearly a Western-inspired murder attack on the population of Russia, even though it appears to have been carried out by jihadists associated with the Islamic State movement. It appeared to involve four gunmen, who opened fire on civilians attending a concert in the public concert hall, shooting dead 138 people and wounding many more, and set the building on fire with incendiaries. Those who carried out the attack fled the scene and were picked up by the Russian state authorities in a car driving south through the Bryansk district, over 200 miles from Moscow and close to the Ukrainian border, within easy distance of Kyiv, around 14 hours afterwards. The Russian security forces have since picked up another 14 suspected of involvement in the crime.
The claim of responsibility for the attack by the ‘Khorasan’ chapter of Islamic State – which has been involved in armed conflict against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and which is supposed to be trying to create a ‘caliphate’ in Central Asia, likely overlapping Russian territory even, is highly suspicious, as Putin made clear. The captured gunmen, from Tajikistan, were very keen to get away and not become martyrs, apparently because there was payment waiting for them if they managed to escape to Ukraine. Hardly a fortune though – a mere million roubles (about £8000). They appear more like pro-imperialist mercenary-terrorists than self-sacrificing fighters against any kind of oppression. The US clearly knew what was being attempted in Russia, as they advised their own nationals and friends in Moscow to avoid large public events such as … concerts. But the Russian authorities say they received no warning from the US or other Western sources. Which is no surprise.
The entire ISIS-K project dovetails very well with imperialist aspirations, as expressed in the Brzezinski plan – the imperialist objective for its proxy wars against Russia, to find ways to break Russia up into ‘manageable’ chunks that can be subordinated and conquered by imperialism. It is therefore in the interest of the world working class that the West are on their way to defeat in Ukraine. The hysterical response to this looming defeat by some in Europe – from Macron’s threats of direct armed intervention of French troops against Russia in Ukraine, to such flagrant terrorist attacks in Russia itself, are a product of Western desperation.
But they still threaten escalation into outright military conflict between Russia/China and imperialism, as do the various provocations in the Far East against China, particularly around Taiwan. There have been numerous attacks on civilian and political targets in Russia – and not only in Russia – by pro-Ukraine Western forces during the Ukraine proxy war. The biggest such act was the destruction of NordStream, which the US senior journalist/whistleblower Seymour Hersh publicly identified as the doing of the US. This amounted to the US engaging in economic coercion and impoverishment of its ‘allied’ populations in Western Europe in pursuit of its vendetta against Russia.
There have also been assassinations and acts of terror sponsored by Ukraine, such as the murder of Dariya Dugina, daughter of prominent rightist philosopher Alexander Dugin, and that of military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky, clearly by Ukrainian-guided assassins. As well as the repeated Ukrainian attacks on the city of Belgorod, with Western weapons, repeated attempts to inflict civilian casualties on the population of Crimea, and the use of cluster munitions and depleted uranium shells in the Donbass, also aimed to kill and poison civilians, basically for the ‘crime’ of being Russian and exercising their right to self-determination by voting to join Russia.
The evident motive for extending this to Moscow and Crocus Hall was the imperialist lust to ‘punish’ the Russian population for the overwhelming re-election of Vladimir Putin in the recent presidential election. Their pretence that there was something untoward about that election result is belied by the opinion poll results of Western-approved polling organisations in Russia, such as the Levada Centre, which reported an 86% approval rating for Putin shortly before he gained 87% of the vote in the Presidential Election – hardly a great surprise! (see https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-is-master-all-he-surveys-russians-head-polls-2024-03-15/).
Likewise, there has been hysteria in the imperialist media over Putin’s refusal to accept the Western cock-and-bull story that IS alone was responsible for the Crocus City Hall atrocity. In the early days of the Special Military Operation in the Donbass there was some serious concern by the West to avoid being seen as responsible for reckless Ukrainian Nazi attacks on Russia itself, but now they don’t bother anymore. There is a continuum of this terrorism against Russia, and the Western denials are so weak and unconvincing that they clearly are no longer very concerned to hide it.
It is already known that various groups of pro-imperialist jihadists are fighting in Ukraine alongside the Nazi forces that dominate the Ukrainian state. This is a continuation of the use of similar jihadists to overthrow Colonel Qadhafi in Libya, and to attempt to bring down Assad in Syria, the second of which Putin’s Russia put a stop to by force in alliance with Muslim forces such as Hizbullah and Iran. Russia has also been supporting the liberation struggles in the Sahel region of West-Central Africa (Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, and others) where French and US imperialism have also been using Islamic State’s mercenary forces against the masses and as a pretext to excuse the presence of colonial troops. And all these things stand on the shoulders of the pro-imperialist jihad against the Peoples’ Democratic Party of Afghanistan in the 1980s, which played a major role in the destruction of the USSR and made the world qualitatively worse for the population of the Global South at the hands of US imperialism and its allies. Many of the most politically conscious, mainly Muslim peoples who have been attacked by the US in its period of ‘unipolar’ supremacy are now joining with the former workers states of Russia and China, still targeted by imperialism for outright conquest, to drive back the arrogant US in their attempt to maintain ‘full spectrum domination’ of the planet.
The fact that pro-imperialist Jihadist/mercenaries are prepared to attack Russia on the US’ s behalf while mainly Muslim Palestinians are facing the most ferociously genocidal assault and mass extermination with US and other Western weapons by the West’s key ally Israel, underlines the treachery of such forces against their own people. Some Western and Israeli politicians have taken to equating Russia with Hamas, and Israel has just given Ukraine a new anti-missile system, which is an attempt at a serious proxy-military escalation against Russia by Israel.
Class Conscious 