Brothers in blood. Why Russia is friends with some Islamic fundamentalists and is fighting others

The propagandaist Margarita Simonyan publicly supported the actions of a security official who cut off the ear of one of the detainees after the terrorist attack in the Crocus. Here you are not Norway, she was acquitted by medieval violent methods. Russia is indeed farther away from Norway and closer in methods and ideology to fundamentalist terrorist organizations. It is not surprising that with many of them, Moscow has established the warmest relations. This material will help to understand which terrorists are friends for the Kremlin and what are the enemies.

In Russia, on federal channels, there are calls for mass killings of peaceful Ukrainians and the destruction of Ukrainian cities on federal channels. The security forces are not shy about the cameras to torture and mutilate suspects, and the heads of state media, in turn, are not shy to show these records on the TV channel. Open state terror is increasingly rapprocheting Russia not so much with the DPRK or Iran, but with terrorist organizations. Most of them have become official Russian allies.

Shia axis: Hezbollah and the Houthis

In 2015, Russia entered the war in Syria on the side of Bashar al-Assad’s government forces. These forces were clearly already at the end, battered by years of fighting and desertion of soldiers and officers, and therefore almost the main allies of the Russians then became various Shia formations sponsored and armed by Iran. The victory of the rebels in the Syrian war threatened Iran with the loss of its main ally in the Arab world, and therefore Tehran spared neither money nor people to preserve the friendly regime of Assad. Iraqi Shiites who sneaked for Iranian religious propaganda, Shia refugees from Afghanistan, whom Tehran forcibly turned into cannon fodder, Iranian volunteers and military personnel went to Syria. But the most notable of the Shia formations was the Lebanese group Hezbollah.

In many democracies, it is recognized as a terrorist, but for Russians they are reliable partners. Deployed to kill diplomats, hijacking planes, bombings in crowded places, hostage-taking and probably also drug trafficking, Hezbollah has established close ties with Russia since the beginning of Russia’s military presence in Syria. Now these ties go far beyond purely military cooperation and include joint operations with the shadow tanker fleet, through which the Russian and Iranian oil is distributed around the world, the laundering of money mined by criminal means and other directly mafia cases.

By the way, with the help of the schemes created by Russia and Hezbollah, schemes for the legalization and transfer of money are financed by another Shiite ally and partner of Moscow – Yemeni Ansar Alla, better known as the Houthis. The Husitov and the Russians are related not only to hatred of the Western world, but also to the propensity to glorify terrorist acts, confidence in his own special mission and dependence on Iranian weapons. Russia has traditionally blocked UN Security Council resolutions aimed at imposing sanctions against the Houthis, and even tried to challenge the inclusion of the group in the American list of terrorist organizations.

Russia even tried to challenge the inclusion of the Houthis in the US list of terrorist organizations

And all this was even before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the final isolation of Russia. Now the relationship between the regimes has become even closer. The Hou’s, the Houites have already been appointed by Russian propaganda by one of the main allies in the struggle for a multipolar world. The abductions of people, deportations, torture, massacres of unarmed – all this characteristic handwriting – Ansar Alla – and is taking place during a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The parties are so close that the Houthis even promised not to touch the Russian ships going through the Red Sea, despite the war they unleashed against the merchant fleets of almost the whole world. This war was an asymmetric response to Israel’s fighting against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. With its help, the Houthis want to force Western countries to abandon support for the Jewish state. In addition to Russia, China was awarded the dubious honor to be on the “White list” by the Houthis. Most likely, this is due to its emphasized neutral position towards the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Hamas, Hamas

The key actors in this conflict on the Palestinian side, including those considered terrorists in the world, are also Russia’s allies. This partnership began in Soviet times, when Moscow provided almost unlimited military, economic and diplomatic assistance to the Middle East enemies of Israel. The Jewish state was perceived by Soviet functionaries as a ready-made platform for Western expansion into the Arab countries, and therefore it was considered hostile.

The Soviet Union supplied thousands of tanks, planes and guns to Syria and Egypt, Israel’s main rivals in the region. At the same time, the Palestinians who did not have their own army, but were underground fighting groups, also came. From the USSR, they received small arms, explosives, agitation materials. The Union also conducted обучениеtraining of militants. Since 1967, Moscow has not officially recognized Israel, diplomatic relations between the countries were not supported. They resumed only in 1991, after the collapse of the Union. However, the warming of relations with Israel did not lead to the cooling of relations with its opponents-Palestinians. The main of these opponents – Hamas – did not fall out of the friends of Moscow even when it became known that the group supports the anti-Russian underground in the North Caucasus, and its leaders called on Russian Muslims to jihad against the authorities of the country.

As in the case of all the groups listed, Russia did not recognize and recognize Hamas as terrorists, although it spoke until recently with words condemning the terrorist attacks committed by the organization. Since the middle of the two thousand, Hamas delegations regularly travel to Moscow, and Dmitry Medvedev, as his president, even personally met in Damascus with Khaled Mashal, the main politburo.

Russia does not recognize or recognize Hamas as terrorists

According to Ukrainian intelligence, the Russians supplied Hamas with weapons that were used to attack Israel in October 2023, including Western ones produced as trophies on Ukrainian fronts. In addition, representatives of the group claimed that with the permission of Moscow in Gaza, the production of Kalashnikov assault rifles and cartridges to them was established.

Of course, the Russians are blocking anti-hamas resolutions in the UN Security Council and in general are lawyers of a terrorist group in the international arena.

For Russia’s literally obsessed with anti-Americanism, Hamas, who hates the West and democracy, is a natural ally. As in the middle of the twentieth century, Moscow is now ready to support every U.S. adversary without looking at how cruel and how toxic cooperation with it can be.

Moscow is now ready to support every U.S. adversary without looking at how cruel this enemy is.

Perhaps the Russian leadership would like to increase influence on the group, put it at the service of their interests. In order, for example, to divert the attention of the world from its crimes in Ukraine with the help of the Kremlin initiated from the Kremlin. But Hamas is definitely not Moscow’s puppet. This confirms, for example, the failure of all Moscow’s attempts to reconcile Hamas with other Palestinian factions. The last attempt was made at the end of February this year and ended in nothing. Hamas’s main political opponent, Fatah, was never able to negotiate with competitors on reconciliation.

The open conflict between Fatah and Hamas began in 2007 with the seizure by the Hamas authorities in the Gaza Strip and has since been in a state of cold war with each other. With Fatah, which is the heart of the ruling government coalition in Palestine, Moscow, by the way, also has a warm relationship with a rather long history. The current chairman of the organization, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the 1980s defended in Moscow a Ph.D. thesis on the topic “The Secret Link between Nazism and Zionism,” the content of which is still kept secret.

The Taliban

By the time the Soviet troops left Afghanistan in 1989, the Taliban group did not yet exist. Its creators and ideologues at the time were mostly in neighboring Pakistan, where they studied in Islamic schools (the very word “Talistan” means “students”). That is, they, unlike those who fought against the Councils of the Mujahideen, there are no and never had prejudices against Moscow. Moreover, it was Moscow, by and large, that provided the Taliban with the opportunity to come to power, but, of course, without realizing it at all.

By and large, it was Moscow that provided the Taliban with the opportunity to come to power.

After all, it was the Soviet invasion that led to the collapse of the fragile Afghan world and the emergence of many armed groups that could not lay down their arms even after the USSR left their country. In the 1990s, these groups fought each other for influence and could not oppose the numerous and well-motivated students who in a matter of years alone destroyed or dispersed all the mujahideen groups.

Until 2001, the Taliban controlled almost the entire territory of Afghanistan, their government only fell after the American invasion. Strong emotions in Moscow, the fall of the Taliban regime did not cause. For many years, Russia has not paid much attention to Afghanistan, a distant country with almost no influence on world processes, but the war against which it so shamefully lost. Perhaps that is why Russia, after the civilized world, still recognized the Taliban as terrorists. But it did not prevent Moscow from negotiating with them.

Negotiations were more demonstrative than real. After 2014, after the capture of Crimea and the beginning of the hybrid occupation of Donbass, Russia in every possible way sought to demonstrate to the world that it remains a reliable and irreplaceable partner: they say, they are ready to join the anti-Igil coalition, and the mediator in the negotiations on the Afghan settlement will speak, even if the world does not pay attention to what the Russians are doing there in a neighboring country.

This continued until the withdrawal of the Western coalition troops from Afghanistan in 2021 and the subsequent lightning-bearing capture of the country by the same Taliban. For the Russians, this defeat of the Western project of democratic Afghanistan has become a real gift. First, they decided that the U.S. would no longer play the role of a world gendarme, helping allies far from their own borders, which eventually pushed Russia to a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

And secondly, during the American presence in Afghanistan, it turned out that the country is literally packed with valuable minerals, which are only waiting for the one who will get, recycle them and send them to the world markets. The Taliban are literally sitting on the ground, in which a trillion dollars will be buried, but have neither technology, experience, nor connections, so that this hidden in the ore trillion turns into cash. The Russians very much want to get a concession from the Taliban for the development of Afghan minerals. And they’re not the only ones.

The Taliban sit on the ground in which a trillion dollars are buried, but have neither the technology nor the experience to turn it into cash.

On the local mineral reserves have the types of neighboring China and India. And they are all desperately trying to achieve the Taliban’s location in order to get the most promising contracts. Government delegations go to Kabul one after another, the Taliban are called at conferences and intergovernmental meetings, and closed after the fall of the democratic authorities of the embassy. And all this abomination is merging the fact that the Taliban was and remains a terrorist organization that deals with extrajudicial executions, executions of prisoners, persecution of people on religious and gender grounds.

ISIS – friendship failed

The main opponents of the Taliban in Afghanistan are dissatisfied with them not because the Taliban are overly cruel and obscurant. These opponents are sure that the ruling regime, on the contrary, is not cruel enough. These opponents are called by “Vilaat Khorasan,” or ISIS-Khorasan. Khorasan is a huge historical area in Central Asia and the Middle East that included parts of the territories of modern-day Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan. ISIS-Khorasan appeared a few years ago, when jihadist groups operating in some of these countries took an oath of allegiance to the self-proclaimed Khalifa ISIS al-Baghdadi.

The Khorasanovites aim to build an Islamic state based on a strict understanding of Sharia law in Afghanistan. And the Taliban are not allies, but enemies. Despite the fact that many of the ISIS-Khorasan fighters themselves were once the Taliban, they eventually moved away from their former comrades.

It is a matter in many ways in the cooperation of the Taliban with foreign governments and the willingness of the Government of the Government to seek international recognition (as long as the Taliban government is not recognized by any State in the world). In the system of values of ISIS there is no need for international recognition of the caliphate. Only the Islamic state is considered legitimate and have the right to exist. All other countries must be subordinated over time to Caliphate, their authorities have been liquidated, and laws and constitutions replaced by Shariah.

The Taliban are not only looking for recognition from those who, in the opinion of ISIS, should not exist, but also actively cooperate with them. This cooperation and the choice of international partners by the Taliban is totally unacceptable for ISIS. This is emphasized by an atheistic China, India, whose main religion is Hinduism – in the eyes of jihadists looks strictly forbidden polytheism. And Russia, which kills Muslims (including ISIS) in the North Caucasus and Syria and therefore occupies one of the first places on the list of enemies of ISIS.

Unlike the terrorist organizations with which Russia cooperates, ISIS is an exclusively ideologically motivated organization. It is far from the political games of Hezbollah, which not only accumulates rockets to destroy Israel, but also drags its deputies to the Lebanese parliament and appoints ministers to the government. Far from Hamas’s opportunism – seemingly radical Sunnis, who without any hesitation take money and weapons from the infiriors of the Russians and Iranian Shia heretics. Far from the calcification of the Taliban, ready to cooperate for the sake of money, even with the idorists.

The ideology of modern Russia and all the groups listed above is based on hatred. Someone has a hatred of the Ukrainians, someone – to Israel, someone – to all the wrongs. But only ISIS is going through pure hatred without being distracted by anything.