March 26, 2024 - 7:15pm
Last weekend’s terrorist attack in Moscow has renewed debate about the capabilities and reach of Islamic State (IS) but also who, exactly, was behind the killing of at least 139 people at Crocus City Hall.
Much of the media coverage has so far focused on Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), an Afghanistan-based IS contingent that was likely involved in the atrocity. But this should not be misunderstood as a separate entity: IS’s “provinces”, such as ISKP, all take their cue from the “centre” in Iraq and Syria.
Nato’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 left Western intelligence constrained in assessing the ISKP threat, but the evidence that IS had turned back to “external” operations, with ISKP a key part of this, stacked up over the last year. A series of ISKP plots were disrupted in Kazakhstan, India, and Europe — including what would have been devastating attacks over Christmas and New Year in Austria and Germany. “Successful” IS attacks hit France and Belgium in October, and then Iran and Turkey in January.
The four visibly-beaten men brought into court in Russia this week as perpetrators were all Tajiks. While information from the Russian judiciary must be handled carefully, most ISKP operatives in the aforementioned cases were Tajiks — a perhaps unsurprising revelation given that IS has been targeting Tajikistan for recruitment.
Tajikistan’s well-established Islamist scene, so close to ISKP’s Afghan base, is an easy recruitment pool and many Tajik jihadists in the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, disillusioned since the 2021 takeover, have been drawn to IS’s “purer” Islam, unconstrained by national boundaries and alliances with “infidel” states such as Russia. Russian-speaking Tajiks with passports were always going to raise fewer red flags, plus the large Tajik migrant labour population in Russia meant that terrorists could blend in easily.
That Russia was targeted was also no accident. Moscow’s relationship with the Taliban-Al Qaeda regime, alongside its strategic alliance with Iran and support for the Syrian regime’s rampage against Sunni Muslims (whom IS claims to represent), provides the ideological cover for IS to strike against Russia.
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Subscribe“The Kremlin’s attempt to link Ukraine, as predictable as it was absurd, has heightened the sense that Moscow is hiding something. ”
Fun facts:
It isn’t just ISIS who have been actively recruiting Tajiks – the Ukrainian Embassy in Tajikistan has also been doing so on various social media outlets.
https://x.com/Sprinterfactory/status/1771592460788982059?s=20
Also in January the German paper Bild reported that ISIS associated Tajiks were entering Europe via Ukraine.
A few days ago, the Russians arrested a couple of Tajik extremists who entered Russia in a much less complicated way, but if someone, considering himself an independent thinker, decides to believe Putin and blame Ukraine, the CIA, the USA and the West in general, I have a hard time convincing him that the simpler arguments exist
Having closely followed the West’s preposterous fairytales of novichok poisonings, alleged chemical weapons use in Syria and Russiagate I see absolutely no reason whatsoever to favour their narratives on anything at all in foreign policy terms. What makes you so certain of them? These are the people who also gave us Iraq WMDs, the Afghan Papers, Libian viagrara troops and all sorts of horrible (but bogus) baby murders.
Before you answer please investigate the disclosures of Ian Henderson and Brendan Whelan – 2 heroic wistleblowers from the OPCW who have proven the West’s claims on Syria to be bogus (Peter Hitchens’s work on this would be a good place to start).
“Having closely followed the West’s preposterous fairytales of novichok poisonings, alleged chemical weapons use in Syria and Russiagate”
Well you can’t have been following them that closely if you think they’re preposterous.
Yes the Met story is preposterous. Here are a few aspects of it:
1. The first medic at the scene, a nurse who we are told was just passing by on a shopping trip with her daughter as she doesn’t live in Salisbury, turned out to be Colonel Alison MacCourt – the most senior nurse in the British Army. What are the chances of that?
2. Despite all the expensively and recently installed Salisbury CCTV being fully functional on the day (confirmed by inquisitive locals making FoI requests) – including one pointing directed at the bench on which the Skripals were found gibbering the Met continue to pretend they don’t know who they met or where they went. What are the chances of that?
3. One meeting they did have after supposedly being contaminated with novichok was with a family feeding ducks – they handed one of the kids some bread and they ate it – the kid was fine, so were the ducks. What are the chances of that?
4. No one has explained how a 60+ year old heavy drinking diabetic man and a fit, thirty something woman could have a dermal exposure to nerve agent, be well enough to go for a stroll, have a few pints & an Italian meal but then collapse 4 hours later so simultaneously that neither could raise the alarm for the other. What are the chances of that?
If you can find anyone in the Establishment media who has asked, let alone answered this I’d be delighted to see it. The physiological mechanism has never been explained and it simply does not correspond with anything we know about these kind of nerve agents or the differences between male & female anatomies when it comes to such exposures – which themselves require them to both have touched the same door-handle when leaving the house.
There are literally dozens of other impossible and implausible aspects of the story – which may explain why the government is currently attempting to keep the Inquiry that they imposed on Dawn Sturgess’s death (rather than an inquest) secret. The Sturgess family barristers have already made numerous complains about the lack of information they’ve been given. You did know that the Inquiry was taking place didn’t y0ou?
I’ve friends in Salisbury who were amazed watching all this BS evolve in real-time. FWIW I think that was when I finally occurred to Bozo that he could get away with anything.
Here’s a timeline of the day from British media (the Met have removed theirs btw):
https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/the-day-of-the-skripal
Thanks for the detailed response. I always find it useful to know who the delusional posters are on a site so I don’t need to bother reading their posts again. That was just routine conspiracy theory logic.
You can disprove my assertion re the physiology by finding any example of the Western press answering the points I raised about the Skripals’s symptoms (or lack of) on that Sunday afternoon. Do please forward me a link if you can – there are plenty of us who hav been waiting for one for years now.
All you are doing is assuming that you are being lied to because you personally don’t understand things, or because an absolutely full explanation of every detail has not been provided. Have you ever noticed that the media, anywhere, never explains every detail on any topic?
You haven’t even said what you think the real events might be, or why you think it’s so preposterous that Russian operatives would murder a former spy.
You are too boring. QAnon is much more interesting
Is this too boring for you? Do you think our governments neve lie? How sweet.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2021/04/pure-ten-points-i-just-cant-believe-about-the-official-skripal-narrative/
I never thought that your governments never lie, but that doesn’t mean Putin never lies. But I have an advantage over you – I know both English and Russian and I never eat rotten fish.
So Tajiks set on bombing Russia would enter Ukraine and then battle their way across the frontline of a major war instead of travelling directly from Tajikstan and claiming to be looking for labouring work on a building site?
Edited
What about the russian men in blue clothing inside the theater being very calm and talking in cellphones during the shootings? Was the FSB overseeing the whole thing? And now the Russians blame the US and British intelligence organisations besides of course the Ukranian secret service.
False flag operation to excuse a major mobilisation? I think a paranoid conspirational mindset is most adequate here.
It was fake. Follow news 🙂
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This is actually not a fake. Many people who like conspiracy theories, like you, have taken notice of these men. No fewer fans of debunking conspiracy theories have found out that these are random characters, a teacher, an oil worker, etc.
Finally, those who, in most cases, don’t give a damn about conspiracy theorists and their exposers, wait until the smoke settles and take into account only the irrefutable facts that appear immediately or emerge later.
For example, Putin said that the terrorists fled to Ukraine, where they were waiting.
The terrorists were caught 140 kilometers from Ukraine and 40 kilometers from Belarus.
Putin’s best friend Lukashenko said that they were heading to Belarus, but Lukashenko raised the alarm at the border and the terrorists decided to go to Ukraine (yes, it’s true, he said this!).
How they learned about Lukashenko’s actions is difficult for me to understand, but imagining the intellectual potential of all participants in this story, I think that the Belarusian border service installed loudspeakers on the border with Russia, announcing through them “Bandits, we will catch you!”
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That’s all Folks!
There is no “Syrian regime rampage against Sunni Muslims” – about 3/4 of Syria’s population is Sunni.
IS was leveraged by the US and UK to topple Assad, but IS’ fringe religious tenets and brutality put off everyone (except of course its US and UK backers). IS then got somewhat too big for its boots and went rogue, capturing swathes of Iraq and obliging the US to carpet-bomb and flatten Mossul to contain the damage.
So now what’s left of IS vegetates in the penumbra of the convoluted recesses of the US’ shadow wars and competing, unaccountable and uncoordinated covert agencies, a franchise available to any enterprising terrorists casting about for a badge to trademark their efforts.
ISKP has links with ISI. Some of their cells have just been busted in India. The propensity of the ISI to engage in violent terrorism with the full backing of its known ” handlers” can easily be searched and found on the Net.
It’s often forgotten who David Headley mastermind of Mumbai 26/ 11 terrorist attacks really was( hint- three letter Deep State agency in the West)
The tactics used in Moscow are not copybook ISIS jihadi- suicide bombing, chanting slogans etc all the more pointing to grayzone tactics to lend credence to ” plausible deniability”.
Cross the dots…
There are a few key facts that make all the conspiracy theories unlikely. ISIS has taken responsibility, for a start, and sent out videos to prove it. And this kind of operation in the most varied countries is in ISIS MO. But the biggest fact is the US’ quite detailed warning, sent out beforehand. If this had been a Russian operation, the US would not have had any way of getting the intelligence. If it had been a Ukrainian operation the US would not have sent out a warning, they would have had it stopped. This operation strengthens Putin and increases Russian backing for the war – neither the US nor Ukrainian government nor any rational operator on the Ukrainian side would have permitted this action. But it makes perfect sense that US intelligence efforts had got information about an ISIS operation.
“Nevertheless, if the Kremlin now finds few believe it was not responsible for the slaughter of innocent Russians”
Only globalists, western bureaucrats, media people and people who still believe anything these groups have to say believe that the Russian government is to blame. They need to in order to be able to maintain their fake climate, covid and immigration narratives – in other words their (equally fake) self respect.
IS are supposed to be the hardest of the hardcore Islamists, yet not one of them martyred himself? Maybe there’s a plausible explanation, but I’d at least like to see this discrepancy addressed.
I call on both sides to exercise ‘restraint’ and not to escalate the ‘cycle of violence’. It’s time for an ‘unconditional ceasefire’. 😉