Implications of the Moscow terror attacks

Comments on a developing situation

Last night, there was an attack on a music venue on the outskirts of Moscow, a mass shooting and explosions occurred, and at this moment, there’s a body count of about 60 dead and more than 100 wounded.

Russian authorities are designating this a terrorist attack, and according to CNN and other Western news media, an Islamic State-affiliated organization, ISIS-K (the K is for Khorasan, a historical province of the Islamic Sasanid empire) operating mainly in Afghanistan, has taken responsibility.

The source of all this is a Telegram post from a channel affiliated with the IS-linked Amaq News Agency, so it’s a claim yet to be verified by other evidence. The Telegram post doesn’t specifically mention the Afghanistan-related IS-group either.

Nonetheless, this message is now being cabled out all over the Western media, forcefully hammering in the connection, and it’s something of a mystery where the New York Times, seemingly the first outlet to mention the ISIS-K outfit, got their information from.

Russia, on the other hand, expresses doubt whether this attack can be connected to Islamic militant groups. There’s no obvious reason why an Afghanistan-based IS outfit would strike Moscow at this moment, but there could of course be links to Russian support in the Syrian war, as well as Russia’s activities in the Caucasus. This is how Western media will likely connect the dots in relation to the claim of IS involvement.

But it’s hard to not contextualize this in relation to the Ukraine war.

Just the last few days, we’ve seen a significant escalation of attacks against critical Ukrainian energy infrastructure, with Russia also now stating it’s no longer only involved in a limited military operation but at war, specifically due to the West’s overt interventions on the Ukrainian side.

The terror attacks in Moscow also comes at the very moment when the world’s eyes were focused on Israel’s imminent Rafah assault, and where the situation seems to be intensifying at this very moment.

They must also be considered in connection with repeated Ukrainian claims (backed by many Western officials (and of course anchored in many a white paper by intelligence-affiliated think tanks) that it’s time to “bring the war home to Russians” and for its population to bear some of the costs and pain of this conflict.

The attack on Moscow is a timely one in many ways. Recall that the first thing the West unanimously and unambiguously proclaims is that “THIS WAS NOT UKRAINE’S DOING”, without more than a couple of printscreens from a Telegram channel and an alleged admission of guilt from an IS-affiliated group to go on (yes, yes, there are many questions to be asked around the nature, character and connections of this set of organizations as well).

So we want to establish the message that the Ukraine or the Western intelligence services had absolutely nothing to do with this, whereas this will be one of the obvious interpretations by both the Russian public and its state officials.

The events also tear up the old wounds from the early 2000s when Russia was plagued by an Islamic insurgency in connection with the Chechen war, where similar terror attacks took place at this kind of public venues, so the psychological effect of these incidents will play on this background.

If the intention is to unbalance Russia and provoke a hasty retaliatory response directed against Ukraine, in spite of the already well-established narrative that those terrible IS terrorists were really behind the attacks, such an outcome would bring many opportunities to galvanize the opposition. If Russia blames Ukraine, it will appear irrational, dangerous and vindictive, bringing further credence to the established Western propaganda narratives, and opening the door towards further escalation and a more cohesive Western response that approaches actual military intervention, in line with the feelers put out by Macron and other Western leaders in the last couple of weeks.

Finally, one may ask if this is the beginning of the drawn-out, NATO-supported insurgency that was predicted by many of us about two years ago.