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brexiiton · 21 days

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After terror attack, Russia sees U.S. role and claims it is at war with NATO

By Robyn Dixon, April 3 2024 at 2:22pm

The Russian flag flies at half-staff on March 28 in memory of the victims of a terrorist attack at the Crocus City Hall in Krasnogorsk, outside Moscow. (Yuri Kochetkov/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

RIGA, Latvia — In the aftermath of last month’s terrorist attack on the Crocus City Hall concert venue outside Moscow, Russian officials not only have blamed Ukraine but also have repeatedly accused the West of involvement — even though U.S. officials insist they gave Moscow a specific warning that the Islamic State could attack the venue.

If the U.S. warning was so detailed, it raises further questions about Russia’s failure to prevent the country’s worst terrorist attack in two decades. But rather than publicly confronting questions about their own actions, Russian security officials have disregarded the claims of responsibility by the Islamic State.

Instead, they have insisted that U.S. and British intelligence were involved in helping Ukraine organize the strike.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment Wednesday on a report in The Washington Post that U.S intelligence specifically warned Russia that Crocus City Hall could be a target for terrorists. The New York Times published a similar report shortly after The Post.

Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev on Wednesday directly blamed Ukrainian security services for the Crocus City Hall attack, in which at least 114 people were killed. Patrushev also hinted at Western involvement.

A day earlier, he accused Western intelligence of using terrorist groups to attack adversaries.

“They are trying to make us think that the terrorist attack was perpetrated not by the Kyiv regime but by followers of radical Islamic ideology, possibly members of the Afghan branch of [the Islamic State],” Patrushev said at a meeting in Astana, Kazakhstan, of security council secretaries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization nations. He said it was more important to identify the “masterminds and sponsors,” squarely blaming Ukrainian security services. He added that numerous hoax bomb threats have emanated from Ukrainian territory since the attack.

“It is also indicative that the West began insisting on Ukraine’s noninvolvement in the crime as soon as the terrorist attack on Crocus City Hall was reported,” Patrushev said.

Russia’s blame game comes amid increasingly confrontational anti-NATO rhetoric from top security officials who insist that the U.S.-led alliance is fighting a “war” against Russia. Several of these officials have hinted repeatedly about Russia’s potential use of nuclear weapons.

NATO officials continue to assert the alliance’s right to supply Ukraine the weapons it needs to defend its territory.

Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev in Moscow in 2022. (Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images)

Since the Crocus City Hall attack, Russian officials have subtly framed the violence as part of that “war,” while barely mentioning the Islamic State’s Afghanistan branch, Islamic State-Khorasan, or ISIS-K, which U.S. intelligence officials have said was responsible.

U.S. intelligence also warned last month that terrorists could attack a Moscow synagogue. A day after receiving the warning, on March 7, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) announced that it had prevented an attack on a Moscow synagogue by an ISIS-K cell.

Asked if the United States warned Russia that Crocus City Hall was a possible target for a terrorist attack and whether a U.S. warning helped the FSB avert the synagogue attack, Peskov on Wednesday declined to confirm the report.

“Okay, I see,” he said. “This is not our competence because such information exchanges are conducted at the level of specialized services, and the information is transmitted directly from service to service.”

The spokeswoman for Russia’s Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, on Wednesday alleged a disinformation campaign by Washington and said the U.S. government should prove that the reports in The Post and the Times were true by disclosing when and to whom the detailed warning was given.

At least two members of the cell that planned the synagogue attack, based in the Kaluga region, were killed by FSB agents when they opened fire during arrest, according to the agency, which reported that the cell was planning to attack the synagogue using firearms. Kazakhstan confirmed that two of its citizens were killed in the raid.

Four days after the Crocus City Hall attack, FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov blamed Ukraine and said Western security services were involved.

“We believe that the action was prepared by radical Islamists, naturally, Western security services contributed to it, and Ukrainian security services bore a direct relation,” Bortnikov told reporters.

Patrushev told the Argumenty i Fakty newspaper in an interview published Tuesday that Washington used NATO as a tool to carry out hybrid wars “to undermine and disorganize the system of state administration of countries that do not agree with the policy of the Anglo-Saxons.”

“At the same time, the alliance does not disdain using terrorist organizations in its interests,” he said. NATO, he said, “has been a source of danger, crises and conflicts for many years.”

Three days before the Crocus City Hall attack, Russian President Vladimir Putin had dismissed the U.S. warnings, calling them “outright blackmail” and attempts to “intimidate and destabilize our society.”

Putin and other Russian officials have made no mention of the U.S. intelligence supplied in relation to the planned synagogue attack.

In an interview with Argumenty i Fakty published on the morning of the Crocus City Hall strike, Peskov said NATO was waging a war against Russia, repeating a linchpin of Kremlin propaganda used to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and to mobilize Russia’s population behind the war.

“We are in a state of war. Yes, it started out as a special military operation, but as soon as that bunch formed there, when the collective West became a participant in this on the side of Ukraine, it has already become a war for us. I am convinced of that. And everyone should understand this, for their internal mobilization,” Peskov said.

Putin alleged a Ukrainian link to the Crocus City Hall terrorists the day after the attack when he told Russians in a speech to the nation that “a window was prepared for them from the Ukraine side to cross the state border.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin appears on a screen onstage in Moscow's Red Square last month. (Reuters)

Top pro-Kremlin propagandists, including Margarita Simonyan, editor in chief of the RT news channel, ramped up attacks blaming Ukraine and the West. In a post on social media, she asserted that Western intelligence clearly played a direct role in the Crocus City Hall attack because it had identified the perpetrators.

“They knew who the perpetrators were. Before the detention. That’s direct involvement,” Simonyan posted, later adding that the source of the attack was “not ISIS,” but Ukraine.

Likewise, Russian lawmaker Alexander Yakubovsky claimed that “the Nazi terrorist regime of Ukraine is behind this terrorist attack, possibly using radical Islamists, but without Western intelligence services it is impossible to pull this off.”

Another hard-line Russian lawmaker, Pyotr Tolstoy, posted on Telegram that the attack could not be seen apart from “the war with the collective West for the peaceful futures of our children.”

The Kremlin’s effort to blame Ukraine and the West for the attack appears to have succeeded in mobilizing Russians around the war effort. Russia’s Defense Ministry announced Wednesday that 1,700 Russians a day were signing contracts to fight in Ukraine, many of them, it added, motivated by the Crocus City Hall attack. In the past 10 days, 16,000 people have signed contracts, it announced.

Shortly after the U.S. warnings were shared with Russia, the authorities did tighten security at Crocus City Hall, according to a 15-year-old coat-check boy, Islam Khalilov. He told Russian media: “We were warned a week ago that there might be attacks. There was training. They told us what to do, where to lead people. I was ready for it in principle. That week there were the toughest checks, with dogs.”

But just days later, on a busy Friday evening, four gunmen rampaged through Crocus City Hall, shooting concertgoers and setting the hall on fire without any resistance, according to video from the scene.

It remains unclear why security was loosened again. Russian officials — and pro-Kremlin news outlets — have steered clear of the question, instead focusing on blaming Ukraine and the West.

Putin, speaking at an Interior Ministry meeting Tuesday, called for increased security at concert venues, shopping centers and other places where crowds gather.

“It’s important above all to bring law, order and security at crowded places, at sports and transport facilities, shopping and recreation centers, schools, hospitals, colleges, theaters and so on up to a new level,” he said.

Russia’s foreign intelligence chief, Sergei Naryshkin, claimed Tuesday that U.S. intelligence on the Crocus City Hall attack was too general to be of help.

“Indeed, the FSB did receive information,” he said. “The information was too general and did not allow the ultimate identification of perpetrators of the horrible crime.”

Shane Harris in Washington and Natalia Abbakumova in Riga contributed to this report.

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tomorrowusa · 1 month

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It's embarrassing to Putin that US intelligence is better than his own secret police at assessing the threat posed by ISIS inside Russia. And it's irresponsible of Putin not to have taken the US advisory seriously.

The US warned Moscow that ISIS militants were determined to target Russia in the days before assailants stormed the Crocus City Hall in an attack that killed scores of people, but President Vladimir Putin rejected the advice as “provocative.” Gunmen stormed the concert hall near Moscow on Friday, opening fire and throwing an incendiary device in the worst terrorist attack on the Russian capital in decades. Isis has claimed responsibility for the attack. Experts said the scale of the carnage – some of which was captured in video footage obtained by CNN showing crowds of people cowering behind cushioned seats as gunshots echoed in the vast hall – would be deeply embarrassing for the Russian leader, who had championed a message of national security just a week earlier when winning the country’s stage-managed election. Not only had Russian intelligence services failed to prevent the attack, they said, but Putin had failed to heed warnings from the United States that extremists were plotting to target Moscow.

Earlier this month, the US embassy in Russia had said it was “monitoring reports that extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow,” including concerts, and it warned US citizens to avoid such places. US National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said the US government had “shared this information with Russian authorities in accordance with its longstanding ‘duty to warn’ policy.” But in a speech Tuesday, Putin had blasted the American warnings as “provocative,” saying “these actions resemble outright blackmail and the intention to intimidate and destabilize our society.” That stance came despite Russian authorities having reported several ISIS-related incidents within the past month.

Some of us may recall another time when the leader of a large country didn't take warnings of a terror attack seriously.

Of course Putin is trying to blame the attack on Ukraine without providing any credible evidence. But anybody who seriously keeps an eye on terrorists understands that this attack was conducted by an ISIS related group. I mean, ISIS-K itself is openly taking credit for the Crocus City Hall rampage.

Russia and its predecessor the USSR have been angering Sunni Islamic militants for a long time. It doesn't take much for ISIS to get pissed off at you and Russia has been giving them lots of material.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 set off the forever war in that region.

Russian intervention in Syria where Putin has been propping up fellow dictator Bashar al-Assad since 2015.

Russia's de facto alliance with the Shi'ite régime in Iran has Sunni ISIS enraged; they consider Shi'ites to be heretics.

Russia's growing involvement in Africa puts it at odds with ISIS elements there – especially in the Sahel.

The Putin régime has been stepping up suppression of religions other than Orthodox Christianity in Russia.

Crocus City Hall, site of the shootings and fire, is in Krasnogorsk which is not terribly far from Putin's official suburban residence in Novo-Ogaryovo. In a direct line, the two are about 9 miles/14.4 km apart; that's the distance between downtown Chicago and the nearest suburb Oak Park. According to Google Maps, it's a 25 minute ride.

I bring this up because it was reported...

President of Russian Vladimir Putin conveyed get-well wishes to victims via Deputy Prime Minister Tatiana Golikova. He did not address the nation himself.

When the late Yevgeny Prigozhin was headed to Moscow with his mutineers last year, Putin apparently fled to the Saint Petersburg area. If the most senior official available just after the Crocus attack was a deputy prime minister, that may be an indication that Putin and other senior figures were headed out of town during the crisis.

Just one more observation: Crocus City Hall was the venue for Donald Trump's 2013 Miss Universe contest.

Crocus City Hall: The Trump-linked venue that's now the scene of a deadly IS attack

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parsabad · 8 months

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Saffron farm/ Khorasan/ Iran

Camera: sina rahmati

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pressnewsagencyllc · 30 days

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Eye on the Middle East | The Islamic State Khorasan province is coming of age

The Islamic State-Khorasan Province (referring to parts of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran) was a group borne out of both desire and necessity. While its formal creation in 2015 reflected the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’s desire to exploit their then popularity amid jihadists around the world, ISIS’ failure to hold its territories, necessitated sustenance elsewhere. In both these cases,…

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vicky-nanjappa · 8 months

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Islamic State urges Jihad in India, cites Nuh and Gyanvapi

Vicky Nanjappa The Islamic State has been trying to incite Indian Muslims on two recent issues. They are the violence in Nuh, Haryana and the Gyanvapi issue in Uttar Pradesh. In a scathing article published in its magazine, the Voice of Khorasan, the Islamic State has called for Jihad in India. It has also issue a threat to Haryana Home Minister Anil Vij. Further the article has also used…

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#Gyanvapi mosque #islamic state #Jihad #Nuh violence #PFI #Vicky Nanjappa #Voice of Khorasan

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ancientgrainsteton · 8 months

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