ISIS offers the Kremlin a Reichstag Fire (UPDATED)

Notes on the news

13:12 Paris time

ISIS has released body cam footage of the attacks taken by the terrorists. It’s apparently as gruesome as you’d expect from them. The video also shows the mall burning and the terrorists safely escaping.

Americans have been warning of ISIS-K attacks in several countries recently, not just Russia. Several days ago, ISIS-K conducted a suicide bombing in Kandahar—which I had not known until now because I saw it reported nowhere. That it wasn’t reported when it happened (or mentioned yesterday in any of the extensive commentary on the attack in Moscow) suggests to me we’ve decided, collectively, never to think about Afghanistan again because it makes us feel bad. This is not just cowardly but very foolish, because Afghanistan’s not done thinking about us, as events in Moscow demonstrate.

In the past year, there have been 21 external ISIS-K plots or attacks. Most recently, one was thwarted in Germany in early March.

Paweł Wójcik:

I know there are many incentives in blaming everything happening in Russia on its deep state, but terrorists exist outside that bubble, and narrative based on undermining them leads to catastrophic consequences—vide ISKP [another name for ISIS-K] in Russia these days, but much more elsewhere.

Russia is currently engaged in military operations against Islamic State in Syria, Mali, Burkina Faso, with a potential to appear in Niger later this year. Results are a different matter, in Syria—fighting a desert insurgency. In Mali—a little proto-state. Of course, Americans are also fighting in their zones like in Kurdish-controlled Syrian part, with hydra not ceasing on attempting prison brakes, infiltrating camps and assassinating people frequently.

In Niger, Americans have provided support against three affiliates of the Islamic State, ISGS, ISWAP, and ISL. Not anymore since the coup, and quickly having the same treatment the French felt. And it was the French fighting Islamic State in Western Africa in recent years mainly.

Islamic State and its branches like Wilayat Kavkaz, and particularly IS Khorasan Province with its advanced media apparatus, developed and expanded besides a heavy Taliban and Pakistani forces crackdown, have always had Russia as a main target, among US and EU.

With recent expansion of external capabilities of the affiliate, transforming into the role AQAP usually performed for Al-Qaeda globally, ISKP networks have been detected in Germany, Austria, Spain, Turkey, Russia, Central Asia states + Maldives, India with a connection to Southeast Asia.

Russia has already been targeted by the group directly—in September 2022, ISKP attacked the Russian embassy in Kabul, using a suicide bomber. At the same time propaganda aimed at Russia increased with the wake of Russian war in Ukraine. Earlier this month on March 7, Russian security forces dealt with ISKP-affiliated jihadists that were looking into staging an attack on a synagogue, a month earlier another group was hunted down while preparing an attack on a chemical lab.

It’s all amid an expected development among jihadi researchers, nothing happening in the vacuum—since ISKP’s suicide bombings in Iranian Kerman in January, and especially since October 7, all networks have been activated, arrests on them performed.

Americans have been regularly warning, that such an attack might come in just six months in the West—it’s happening in Russia, but we must remain vigilant too, amid heavily radicalized Central Asian (but not only) diasporas, with links to ISKP, IS Somalia and ISGS.

The problem is complex—al-Qaeda declared jihad in Mali against Russians last summer, later issuing another after the Israeli invasion on Gaza. Their networks have always had been in the back of everyone’s mind.

While again—we are still under the influence of Islamic State Central campaign declared in January: “Kill them, wherever you find them.” aimed at Jews and Christians worldwide. Russians fit the category, given the label Russians have always been called as in the propaganda.

Ukraine’s military intelligence spokesman, meanwhile, says the attack was conducted by Russian intelligence. (In Ukrainian)

The Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine says that the terrorist attack in the Moscow region was a deliberate provocation by Putin's regime Intelligence Directorate spokesman Andriy Yusov said, “This is a deliberate provocation by Putin’s special services, about which the international community was warned. The Kremlin tyrant started his career with this and wants to end it with the same crimes against his own citizens.”

So far I’ve found nothing to suggest why the directorate believes this. It would obviously be in Ukraine’s interest to persuade the world that this is true, so I expect that if they have any evidence, they’ll be sharing it with their US counterparts. It would have to be something remarkable to explain how Russia got ISIS in on the plot.

But I expect they’re saying this to stir up as much suspicion and paranoia as possible in Russia. The accusation will sound plausible to Russians—everyone there knows how the FSB operates. There’s already going to be anger with Putin for permitting this to happen, and suspicion that he ordered it will only heighten the tension. So Ukrainians have a strong motivation to say this, all the more so because Putin is trying blame Ukraine for the attack and a non-trivial number of Western idiots are eager to believe him.

Still, it’s never a good idea to undermine the credibility of your own intelligence services. I would strongly advise them against saying this unless they can actually prove it, or at least make a strong case for it.

The evidence that ISIS did this is strong. Body cam footage is hard to refute. I suppose the footage could be a deepfake, but ISIS is not at all known for claiming attacks for which it’s not responsible. (They did mistakenly claim the Las Vegas attack, but this seems to have been an honest error: They genuinely believed they were responsible.)

The Taliban has condemned the attack, as has Hamas: “We condemn in the strongest terms the recent terrorist attack in Moscow and consider it a blatant violation of all human standards,” said the Taliban. The Taliban and ISIS are at war, of course. And Hamas is allied with Russia.

Here’s the speech in which Putin dismissed the US’s warnings:

Kasparov is right: It’s is a foolproof sinister-moron identification test:

Also, overnight, the Ukrainian Air Force successfully struck two more Ropucha-class landing ships in Sevastopol. And a Russian cruise missile entered Polish airspace at 04:23 in the morning. After 39 violating Polish airspace for 39 seconds, the missile changed direction and headed towards Ukraine.

Often I wonder if we’ll make it through the year.

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Yesterday

I thought a quick roundup of what we know about the terrorist attack in Moscow would be condign. Bookmark this page: I’ll update it if there’s more news over the weekend.

The death toll, last I checked, has risen to 133. Many were gravely injured so we can expect the number to rise. The means the Crocus Hall attack has surpassed in deadliness the Paris attacks of 2015 in which 130 were murdered in the Bataclan theater and elsewhere, making it one of the worst terrorist attacks in Europe in the past twenty years. Only the 2004 Madrid bombings and the 2004 siege in Beslan claimed more lives.

FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov reported yesterday that 11 suspects, including four supposedly directly involved in it, were detained in the Bryansk region, which borders Ukraine. Gruesome videos have been published in the Russian media purporting to show their interrogation. Meduza says the clothes the detainees are wearing in these videos match those worn by the terrorists in ISIS’s press release. This would be pretty definitive, if it’s true. I can’t confirm it because I’m not going to watch the videos, but if you have the stomach for it, knock yourself out.

Meduza is also reporting that a neo-Nazi security officer from the Nazi unit Rusich cut off one of the suspect’s ears and posted a video of it to Telegram. (The security officer apparently obscures his identity with an SS Death’s Head.) I haven’t watched the video and I certainly don’t plan to, but from Meduza and various other reports, it shows a suspect lying on the floor with his hands tied, surrounded by security forces, head bloody, and part of his right ear missing. One of the security forces takes the ear, sticks it in the suspect’s mouth, and says, “Eat it, you bastard! I’ll cut your dick off and put it in your mouth!” Then the suspect spits out his ear and the Death’s Head punches him in the face. These people deserve each other.

(I do sincerely hope that was a terrorist and not some hapless rando.)