The mountains of south Sinai are viewed from the window during a flight to Cairo from Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt
As evidence grows that a bomb may have downed a Russian passenger jet over Egypt, the Kremlin is focused on countering the threat of terrorism at home from Islamic State sympathizers.
Officials insist they were prepared for the risk of terrorist reprisals after President Vladimir Putin ordered air strikes against militants in Syria. Even if an attack on Russians abroad wasn’t among their most likely scenarios, the loss of 224 lives in the Metrojet crash is underlining the importance of keeping a simmering domestic insurgency under control.
“We need to ring the alarm bells, there’s a significant increase in the level of risk,” said Rizvan Kurbanov, a member of parliament for Dagestan, a North Caucasus region that’s experienced some of Russia’s worst terrorism. “If the problem was a local one in the past, now it’s in a number of other regions of the country.”
An Islamic State affiliate claimed it blew up the jetliner that left Sharm el-Sheikh for St. Petersburg on Oct. 31, saying it was in retaliation for Russian bombing in Syria. Russians becoming the targets of international terrorism adds another element of risk that Putin must navigate in his quest to restore his country’s role in global affairs. He built his political strongman image while fighting home-grown attacks and the Kremlin will be keen to avoid a new wave of violence undermining support for the military campaign that began Sept. 30.
Russia’s Federal Security Service says people suspected of financing international terrorism, a term usually used to describe Islamic State and similar groups, have been found in 77 of the country’s 85 regions. There’s also been a steady stream of arrests of suspects linked to Islamic State, which was named as the prime target of the Syria air strikes.
“We understand of course that, with the start of this operation, all these terrorist organizations in Syria and those that morally and financially support them will try to activate groups in the underground who remain in Russia,” Viktor Ozerov, chairman of the defense committee in the Federation Council, the upper house of parliament, said in an interview.
Russian authorities should set up a program to “conduct ideological warfare against Islamist terrorism,” particularly on the Internet, as children as young as 12 are playing at being militants in schools, said Kurbanov, a former top security official in Dagestan. “We know very well how to destroy and pre-empt” terrorists “though we’re doing little to fight their ideology.”
Putin ordered Russian flights to Egypt halted on Friday to ensure “the safety of our citizens,” his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters. The U.S. and the U.K. said a bomb may have caused the plane crash in the Sinai desert, a view echoed by France. Egypt and Russia said they have no evidence for this, though they haven’t ruled anything out and investigators are probing a last-second noise heard on the flight data recorder. Ilya Arkhipov, Bloomberg
russian artist sets security agency’s door ablaze
A Russian artist known for his radical performances has been detained after setting fire to the door of the headquarters of Russia’s chief security agency. Russian news agencies quoted Pyotr Pavlensky’s lawyer Olga Chavdar as saying his client was detained early yesterday. Pavlensky’s associates released a video on his social media account that showed him standing next to the burning door of Russia’s main security agency FSB, holding a petrol canister. The building on Lubyanka square previously housed the KGB. Pavlensky said in the script accompanying the video that his performance was meant as a protest against FSB’s heavy-handed tactics. In his arguably most shocking performance, Pavlensky in 2013 nailed his scrotum onto the cobbles of the Red Square.
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