Moscow appears to have found a scapegoat for Tuesday's sabotage of a powder keg and transformer that hit the railway in its rear Crimea. Or a tartar head, rather. As announced yesterday by the Russian agency Tass, the FSB (Federal Security Service, former KGB) dismantled a cell of the Hizb ut Tahrir al Islami, the Islamic Liberation Party. This "underground cell of the terrorist organization was made up of six Russian citizens" and "it has been determined that with the coordination of emissaries of Hizb ut Tharir in Ukraine, recruiting Russian Muslim citizens." Propaganda materials, “communications equipment and digital storage used for their terrorist activity” were found in their homes.
The Tatars, originally from the Crimean peninsula, were one of the minorities most punished by Stalinism, victims of deportations that left the local population reduced to possibly 12% today.
According to the Crimean Solidarity Tatar association, it is not six but five detainees. All of them "are accused of being members of the Islamic political party Hizb ut Tahrir, recognized as a terrorist in Russia but which operates without restrictions at the level of national legislation in many countries of the world." The FBS accuses them, always according to the same version, of “blowing up a gas pipeline in the town of Perevalnoye” last year. "The Crimean Tatars do not admit guilt and state that the case was fabricated, with the use of torture."
That is to say, the arrests would not have in principle to do specifically with the sabotage on Tuesday. However, this is not the first time something like this has happened. Three days after the still-mysterious Novofiodorovka air base attack on August 9 – in which nine Russian warplanes were destroyed – Tatar activists and “citizen journalists” who oppose the Russian annexation of Crimea have been rounded up since 2014.
In connection with the gas pipeline case, the deputy chairman of the Majlis of the Crimean Tatars, Nariman Dzhelyalov, is also accused, along with others, of "smuggling explosives". It so happens that the Majlis, the representative and executive body of this minority, was declared outlawed by Russia in 2016.
As for the Islamic Liberation Party, in the context of generally lax Tatar Islam, it constitutes a small group that functions more like a brotherhood and has generally been seen by the mufti of Crimea, and by the Majlis, as a harmful movement. Wahhabi-inspired fundamentalist.
Indeed, the Hizb ut Tharir, founded in 1953 by a Palestinian from Jerusalem, Taqiy al Din al Nabani, aspires to a universal caliphate but strictly in Muslim countries and, significantly, does not defend armed struggle as a way to establish it. Present in countries such as Tunisia or Libya and spread throughout the Muslim states of Central Asia, such as Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan or Uzbekistan, its history records both tolerance and outlawing. Some branches admit the use of violence –such as the one based in London– and others do not, but in general it does not have a history of terrorism.
But in the current circumstances, and if Russia could fear Islamist activism in Crimea, now with all the more reason. If indeed the Tatars in favor of the return of the peninsula to Ukraine have gone over to the partisan struggle, as the FSB has claimed, nothing will prevent Moscow from saying that it is fighting the Ukrainian Nazis and the jihadists at the same time, a synthesis that would lead the discourse Russian official to evoke the participation of Muslims in Hitler's army. There will be time for this, given that the Ukrainian presidential adviser Mijailo Podoliak has said – in an interview with The Guardian – that military actions in Crimea will continue, with the bridge over the Kerch Strait, which links the peninsula with Russia, as one of the the main objectives.
