Who Really Attacked Moscow?

Some rational counterintelligence analysis of false flag terrorism, general and specific, particularly when Russians are involved

The world watched in horror last Friday as social media began filling up with gut-wrenching images of a major terrorist attack unfolding in real time. The location was Crocus City Hall, a music venue outside Moscow on the ring road, northwest of the capital. Shortly before a sold-out rock concert began, four gunmen opened fire on concertgoers with AK-type automatic weapons, as well as setting fires with incendiaries. Russian security forces were slow to respond to the attack, which at this time has claimed 139 dead, with more perhaps coming, since many of the nearly two hundred injured had life-threatening wounds.

How this happened in Russia, which is publicly vigilant about terrorism, with a particularly strong security presence in the Moscow region, is an embarrassing question for President Vladimir Putin. Not least because the almost quarter-century of Putin’s increasingly authoritarian rule in the Kremlin has featured Islamist terrorist atrocities – several of them murky in origin – as major turning points in his tenure. Now there’s been another one.

The Islamic State—Khorasan Province (IS-KP), an offshoot of the broader Islamic State terrorist franchise, has been blamed for the attack. Russian authorities so far have eight suspects in custody, including the four accused terrorists (all citizens of Tajikistan, ranging in age from 19 to 32), plus four other Central Asians who allegedly assisted the terrorists. IS-Central claimed responsibility for the Crocus attack through their online Amaq news feed.

IS-KP’s involvement in this outrage is plausible. That group’s early period, during the last years of U.S.-backed rule in Kabul, focused on attacks in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan, expanding in 2022 into Central Asia. Since then, however, IS-KP has attempted increasingly far-reaching terrorist actions. In January of this year, IS-KP terrorists blew up Iranian commemorations of the fourth anniversary of the assassination (by U.S. military and intelligence) of Qasem Soleimani, the longtime head of special operations for the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. This was the deadliest terrorist attack in modern Iranian history, leaving around a hundred dead plus hundreds of wounded. Senior U.S. officials asserted that they had warned Tehran of this impending IS-KP attack, but Iranian officials ignored that threat intelligence.