Assailants burst into a large concert hall in Moscow on Friday and sprayed the crowd with gunfire, killing over 60 people, injuring more than 100 and setting fire to the venue in a brazen attack just days after President Vladimir Putin cemented his grip on power in a highly orchestrated electoral landslide.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement posted on affiliated channels on social media. A U.S. intelligence official told The Associated Press that U.S. intelligence agencies had learned the group’s branch in Afghanistan was planning an attack in Moscow and shared the information with Russian officials.
It wasn’t immediately clear what happened to the attackers after the raid, which state investigators were investigating as terrorism.
The attack, which left the concert hall in flames with a collapsing roof, was the deadliest in Russia in years and came as the country’s war in Ukraine dragged into a third year. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin called the raid a “huge tragedy.”
When I first saw the news of this I for sure thought Putin was going to use this as a casus belli to invade more nations. Now that ISIS has claimed responsibility I’m not so sure
Maybe they want to have another go at Afghanistan. Seems to always work out well for whoever tries it.
Maybe they’ll try it “Israeli style”
He has to wait 9 more turns, or else he gets 150 grievances. But he’s been denounced by 180 other players, so what does it matter?
If it helped Putin get something he wanted, he would have just ordered the attack himself.
This is interesting, especially since we haven’t heard much from ISIS in several years and that the US warned Russia about it ahead of time.
Now, I’ll just speculate.
The US was helping Ukraine. Then Iran backed an attack by Hamas on Israel, which gave the US a distraction to deal with from supporting Ukraine. There was speculation that Russia pushed Iran to push Hamas to do the attack for this very reason.
Now, US intelligence could be playing the same game. With this attack, Russia has a hard time selling Ukraine as the biggest threat to Russian people. They’re under attack by ISIS terrorists. Surely, this will take some focus off of the Ukraine war and put pressure on Putin to counter ISIS. Somehow the US did have foreknowledge of the attack…
Of course this is all just speculation, but if we’re trying to think like covert ops and play 4D chess, it could make sense.
Well except Iran didn’t push Hamas, in fact their reaction to the war seems to indicate that they’re privately wanting to choke the life out of Hamas for what they did because they wanted to arrange a full court press with all their chess pieces moving at once instead of Hamas charging in causing Israel to harden even further
If this was an Iran backed move, you’d have seen Iraq basically lighting itself on fire, Syria moving on the Golan Heights, Hezbollah launching attacks on Israel’s north and also their desalination plants, the Houthis launching strikes against KSA’s oil infrastructure, all while Iran closes the straight of Hormuz.
They’ve been setting this board since the revolution and they don’t want to move any of the pieces until they are at peak assurance that they’ll walk away with complete hegemony over the middle east at least as far as the East Mediterranean Coast at the end of it all.
I’ve wondered about this since it happened. The Kremlin has certainly benefited.
Iran denies being involved in Hamas attack on Israel and had no interest in a further escalation, so it is unlikely that they pushed for it. Russia made deals with Israel, that Israel stays out of sanctions against Russia in return for Russia letting Israel attack Iranian proxies in Syria. Also Israeli drones are used by the russian military and have been shot down over Ukraine.
Iran is very much not happy with how Russia lets Israel bomb them in Syria. They most definetely dont trust Russia enough to take such a risk.
The one who have an interest in blaming October 7 on Iran are Israel and War Hawks in US politics, who want a war with Iran and justify unconditional support of Israel.
ISIS-K, so that probably means troop deployments into central Asia since that’s what the K stands for, the “Khorosan Province”
If Putin takes hints from lemmygrad (as it sometimes seems like he does), they will blame USA for this somehow.
edit Oh, of course they are going to blame Ukraine. Putin was just elected, so he’s gonna do/allow another fake terrorist attack in Russian soil. Like he has done several times before.