Moscow attack reminds us of the links between Islamists and Kiev’s fundamentalist nationalists

On March 22, 2024, a commando of four fighters attacked the audience of a rock concert at the Crocus City Hall in Krasnogorsk (a north-eastern suburb of Moscow), killing 133 people and wounding 140 others. It then set fire to the building.

The Russians stopped the terrorist commando as they tried to cross the Ukrainian border, while on the other side they were expected. They were identified as Tajiks. They confessed to having been recruited via the Internet to kill for money. They said they had had no contact with their employer. However, a business card in the name of Dmytro Yarosh was found on them. As Yarosh was founder of the Pravy Sektor militia, number 2 on the Ukrainian Security Council, and then advisor to the head of the armed forces, the Russian authorities immediately accused Ukraine. Yarosh denied his country’s involvement [1]. Seven accomplices were also arrested.

The Russian anti-terrorist police tortured these terrorists and filmed their actions. Public television showed them and commented on them. Russian culture is both European and Asian. The Russian people feel no empathy for criminals.

Daesh claimed responsibility for the attack, cutting short accusations of a Russian false-flag operation. These terrorists were not fanatics, but professionals. They didn’t immolate themselves in public, but fled, like those who attacked Paris and Saint-Denis, killing 130 people in 2015. So they didn’t act out of hatred of Russia, but as part of a military operation whose strategic implications had been thought out in advance.

According to US National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson, Islamic State terrorists are solely responsible for this attack. Numerous commentators have denounced any amalgam between the Islamic organization and supporters of the Kiev government. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia of reflexively attacking Ukraine. Yet Russian President Vladimir Putin has maintained his accusations exclusively against Kiev, ignoring Daesh.

Since 2014 and the overthrow of the elected Ukrainian president, we have regularly highlighted the links between integral nationalists and Islamists, and particularly the role of Dmytro Yarosh. The facts speak for themselves. We don’t know whether or not the Ukrainians organized this attack, but it’s clear that they knew the attackers very well: Ukrainian integral nationalists and jihadists have been fighting together for three quarters of a century.

• Before the Second World War, the Muslim Brotherhood forged ties with the Nazis against the British. Not surprisingly, all the anti-colonialist movements of the time (including India’s M.K. Gandhi) naturally turned to the Axis in search of an ally. In general, they distanced themselves as soon as they had verified their racism on the spot. However, the Brotherhood benefited from subsidies from the Third Reich during the years [2] and maintained these links throughout the war. When, at the Liberation, the British and American secret services took over many Nazi leaders and recycled them in their "Cold War" against the Soviets, they also took over the governance of the Muslim Brotherhood. It was therefore quite natural for the CIA to bring together Gerhard von Mende, the Nazi specialist in Islam in the Soviet Union, with Saïd Ramadan, the son-in-law of the Brotherhood’s founder. Ramadan had been in charge of a program on Pakistani public radio [3], so the CIA placed him in Munich at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. There, he hosted a program for Soviet Muslims and met Stepan Bandera, leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), and his right-hand man, Yaroslav Stetsko, the former Ukrainian Nazi Prime Minister. It was precisely the "Banderists" (referred to as "Ukrainonazis" by the Kremlin, but calling themselves "integral nationalists") who carried out the 2014 coup ("EuroMaidan") against the elected Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych [4].
• In the 1970s, Saudi billionaire Osama bin Laden attended meetings of the World Anti-Communist League organized by Chiang Kai-Shek and ... Yaroslav Stetsko [5]. Osama bin Laden was a member of the Brotherhood and had been trained by the brother of Sayyid Qutb, the Brotherhood’s strategist and theorist of jihad. It was in this context that he was chosen by the USA to become the leader of the mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviets.

– Nazis and Islamists fought together again against the Russians, in the creation of the Islamic Emirate of Itchkeria (Second Chechen War, 1999-2000). However, I have found no precise documentation of their involvement.

Dmytro Yarosh presiding over the alliance of Ukrainian "integral nationalists" and Muslim Brotherhood militias, May 8, 2007 in Ternopol.

• On May 8, 2007, in Ternopol (western Ukraine), on the initiative of the CIA, the "integral nationalists" of the Ukrainian People’s Self-Defense and the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood created an anti-Russian "Anti-Imperialist Front" under the joint chairmanship of the Emir of Itchkeria, Dokka Umarov, and Dmytro Yarosh (who has since reconstituted Stepan Bandera’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN)). The meeting was attended by organizations from Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine and Russia, including Islamist separatists from Crimea, Adygea, Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachaevo-Cherkessia, Ossetia and Chechnya. Unable to attend due to international sanctions, Dokka Umarov, had his contribution read [6].

• From November 2013 to February 2014, Ukrainian integral nationalists carried out the "Revolution of Dignity", under the supervision of Straussian Victoria Nuland, then Assistant Secretary of State for Eurasian Affairs. The Western press claimed that the president’s police had fired on the crowd. On the contrary, a Kiev court later established that unidentified gunmen on rooftops had assassinated demonstrators and police at the same time, a method already used by the CIA in many other countries to trigger pseudo-revolutions.

• The leader of the Islamic youth movement Azatlik, the Russian Naïl Nabiullin, left to wage jihad against Syrian Muslims in the tradition of the Brotherhood. He then returned to Ukraine and took part in the coup with his fighters [7].

• According to the New York Times, the Sheikh Mansour and Djokhar Doudaïev battalions, mainly made up of Chechens from Georgia and Uzbekistan, and the Crimea battalion, made up of Tatars, all of whom had fought against Muslims in Syria, were engaged in the Donbass by Kiev’s integral nationalists against Russian-speaking populations [8].

• In August 2015, Tatar leader Mustafa Djemilev founded the International Muslim Brigade in Ankara (Türkiye) to retake Crimea from Russia. He is received by the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who pledges to finance these jihadists [9]. This militia depends on Hizb ut-Tahrir, a split-off of the Brotherhood. It brings together fighters from Tatarstan and Chechnya (Russia), Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Meskhetia (Georgia). It was based in Kherson, but its role was limited to sabotage, depriving Crimea of drinking water and electricity, as the Tatar population rallied to Moscow.

• For the past month, a hundred Ukrainian Special Forces commandos have been stationed in Sudan in support of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan [10]. The latter went to Libya to meet former mufti El-Sadeq el-Gheryani, a recognized leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. He also sent commandos to fight for him, alongside the Ukrainians. It was this support that enabled general al-Burham to retake Karthoum on March 12, 2024, from the forces of his rival, "general" Mohamed Hamdan Dogolo (known as "Hemeti").

For two decades, we have been documenting the instrumentation of the Islamists by the Anglo-Saxon secret services. There is no convincing explanation for 9/11 [11] the war against Iraq or the "Arab Spring" [12]. This truth will only be hard to admit for those who believe that the war in Ukraine is nothing more than Russian aggression, and that Ukrainian "integral nationalists" are fighting only for their country, and in their country.