Is ISIS in Moscow, Or Is Putin Doing ‘False Flag’ Again?
The first news came at around 8.30pm local time. Police and emergency services responded to a red alert. Within 60 minutes two separate explosions were heard covering the area in smoke with views of flames spreading. Hundreds of people were trapped inside. The gunmen opened fire on latecomers; some visitors already on-site survived by hiding in toilets and punching holes through to communication shafts.
The Islamic State’s Afghan branch, known as ISIS-K, has claimed responsibility for the attack on Moscow’s Crocus Center Cathedral. The shooting and fire at Crocus Center went on for more than 90 minutes before TV mentioned anything about it. It resulted in 115 deaths — announced thus far — and 150 injured.
There are reports that the gunmen got away.
Was this another false-flag operation by Putin? Is he trying to incite even more hatred against Ukraine and the West?
There are a few reasons to think that this is a straightforward — insofar as anything can be straightforward in Russia — terrorist attack.
ISIS does deploy civilian mass-casualty events to weaken governments. American officials told several news outlets that they thought the terrorist group was to blame.
There are at least two reasons why a fundamentalist Moslem terror group would want to wreak homicidal havoc in Russia.
Putin’s forces were literally drawing and quartering dissidents and opposition soldiers in Chechnya.
Second, the long reign of Bashar al Assad in Syria has been made longer due to the heavy intervention of Russian troops bolstering him and killing as many ISIS members as possible. This is where Wagner Group first came to fame.
Putin dismissed the warnings during his annual address to his most senior spies on March 19th. “All this resembles outright blackmail and an intention to intimidate and destabilise our society.”
A Russian foreign ministry spokesperson spoke about the warnings, saying that if America had information the US should share it.
The US did share it, on March 7th. Putin responded that we were just trying to “intimidate and destabilize” Russia.
Recall that the US warned the world in 2022 that Russia was planning to invade Ukraine. Russia ridiculed the US and then invaded the Ukraine. So that part of a pattern holds.
Ramzan Kadyrov immediately said that Chechnya wasn’t to blame…unlike the massacre in the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow by Chechen terrorists on 23 October 2002, resulting in the taking of 850 hostages.
Russia’s security apparatus, focused on bringing carnage to Ukraine, has failed in Moscow. Russia’s leaders, focused on demonizing the US, did not protect Russians. What next? Where to direct the blame?
No doubt the Kremlin will blame Ukraine and the United States for this terror attack, and use it to justify continuing atrocities in Ukraine.
Images purported to be of the Cathedral attackers were actually first posted in early March, showing the faces of five militants killed during a shoot-out in Ingushetia. Another report aired a falsified video of a Ukrainian official claiming credit for the attack; this was debunked.
Moscow has held meetings with Hamas and 14 regional Arab leadership since October 2023, but no agreements have come out of them.
There are differences — as far as we can tell at this stage — between this attack and the usual “false flag” attacks that Putin has used previously to cement his terrorist rule.
Back in the day, the residents of an apartment block in southeast Moscow were sleeping uneasily during the night of September 9, 1999. Five days earlier a bomb had killed and injured more than 100 people in a southern Russian city, and the perpetrators had not yet been found. The authorities immediately blamed Chechen terrorists.
Ahead of the bombings, Alexander Zhilin, a military journalist, wrote in Moskovskaya Pravda, that plotters were planning to use terror attacks in Moscow. The plan was referred to as “Storm in Moscow.”
There were bombings in:
Manezhnaya Square, Moscow, where 29 people were injured;
Buynaksk, Dagestan involving a car bombing outside a 5-story apartment building that left 29 people dead;
Pechatniki apartment building in Moscow that killed 160 people;
Kashirskoye apartment bombing that left 119 people dead;
Volgodonsk, Rostov Oblast, apartment explosion that killed 17 people; and
And then there was the Ryazan incident.
In the evening of September 22 in the town of Ryazan, not far from Moscow, a resident reported to the local police that he’d seen three suspicious-looking individuals carrying sacks into the basement of his apartment building. By the time the police arrived, the suspects had left in a car whose licence plates had been partially papered over. The police found three sacks, connected to a detonator and a timing device. The entire building was swiftly evacuated. Later, a former FSB colonel, Mikhail Trepashkin, who stuck his neck out to investigate the Moscow bombings, was tried and sentenced to four years in a military prison. He had been arrested just days after telling a journalist that a composite sketch of one of the suspects in the first blast, at 19 Guryanova Street in Moscow, resembled a man he recognised as an FSB agent.
The three figures in Ryazan, soon identified as FSB agents, were spotted planting explosives in a building basement. Mr. Putin’s successor as head of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev, put out a statement citing a “training exercise.” It was announced that the three sacks contained sugar.
This is the same Patrushev who remains Putin’s close adviser today, who reportedly blew up the aircraft of renegade Wagner kingpin Yevgeny Prigozhin. Among Patrushev’s many roles, he is the Russian media’s authoritative source of anti-Western conspiracy theories, including a claim that the U.S. is eyeing Russian lands in anticipation of Wyoming and Montana being consumed by volcanoes (yes, he says this).
So: Who did the bombings, and why?
We can draw a picture of the ideal suspect by looking at half-a-dozen patterns with the same “signature”, indicating that it was the same perpetrator each time.
The common factors include:
Inside Knowledge: The perpetrators had to have a “game plan” of which buildings were going to be blown up, in which cities, at what times.
Organizational Depth: In each case a powerful explosive was used. Whoever provided it was able to obtain or manufacture several tons of powerful explosives.
Engineering Skill: The explosives were precisely placed to destroy the weakest, most critical elements of the buildings and force them to “collapse like a house of cards”.
Transportation: Challenge-free distribution was needed, with delivery of the explosives to a variety of destinations across Russia without the possibility of interference by police.
Special Knowledge: The dynamics of explosions was important to know, so the charges would focus their blasts in the most destructive pattern.
Precision: The timers were set to go off at night and inflict the maximum number of civilian casualties.
Money: The detonators were first-class and had been prepared on a professional level.
These are the elements that are on display in an attack carried out by Putin’s FSB secret service.
Compare those bombings to an actual Chechen bombing. The Moscow theatre hostage crises in 2002 involved bona fide Chechens, who claimed allegiance to an Islamic separatist movement and demanding an end to the second Chechen war. They made no attempt to bomb secretly: their actions were open and aimed at publicity. They attacked with a large number of people — 40 insurgents — and placed explosives in a haphazard manner around a building. 850 hostages were trapped in the House of Culture of State Ball-Bearing Plant Number 1.
Yes, that one. Name rolls off the tongue.
As you might recall, it ended badly for everyone. Russian special agents pumped chemicals into the ventilation system and managed to knock out all the attackers but also killed 132 hostages.
That is a Chechen attack: public, real-time drama to get attention.
Not at all like the apartment bombings.
The Crocus Centre attack looks like the Moscow Theatre terrorist attack, and not like the false flag operations conducted by Putin elsewhere.
I would say at this time that this attack is real, from the outside, and a far greater danger to a befuddled Putin than any Ukrainian drone strike.
In the meantime, Moscow continues to kill Ukrainians every day as it has for more than two years.
Let that mitigate our sorrow over the Crocus attack.
Written by Barry Gander
A Canadian from Connecticut: 2 strikes against me! I'm a top writer, looking for the Meaning under the headlines. Follow me on Mastodon @Barry
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