We are still haunted by ISIS

It was hardly a surprise when ISIS claimed responsibility for Friday evening’s terror attack in Russia. From the indiscriminate slaughter of nearly 140 people to the target itself – a rock concert – it bore all the grisly hallmarks of the Islamist network. It immediately brought to mind the ISIS attack on the Bataclan theatre in Paris in November 2015, and the suicide bombing of an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester in May 2017.

Although Russian authorities are yet to officially assign responsibility to ISIS, preferring instead to cynically hint at some Ukrainian involvement, it seems pretty clear that ISIS affiliate Islamic State – Khorasan Province (ISIS-K) was behind the atrocity. The four suspects arrested by Russian security forces are all from Tajikistan, which borders the ISIS-K stronghold of Afghanistan. ISIS media channels have since even released body-worn camera footage of the massacre, in an attempt to remove all doubt as to the attack’s provenance.

This horrific attack on people attending a rock concert, just outside one of the most populous cities in Europe, ought to remind us that the Islamist barbarians are still among us. That the threat of ISIS, in particular, persists.

For a while now, it has been tempting to think otherwise, to hope that the threat from ISIS had ebbed. Having emerged from the West-led destruction of Iraq in the late 2000s, ISIS reached the height of its powers in the mid-2010s, when it controlled about a third of war-torn Syria and nearly half of Iraq. It was during this period that ISIS-backed terrorists carried out the terrorist attacks in Paris. But by the end of 2017, a combination of US and Russian firepower, as well as Kurdish fortitude, had seemingly laid much of ISIS to waste. It was successfully expelled from 95 per cent of the territory it had once held. In December 2018, then US president Donald Trump declared ISIS defeated. Three months later, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces appeared to have rooted out the last remnants of ISIS in Baghouz, near the Syria-Iraq border.

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