© The Reading Junkie / An American tourist in Russia
© The Reading Junkie / An American tourist in Russia
-What now, Columbo?
-Oh, it's probably nothing. But two hours after the attack your office blamed ISIS-K.
-Yes and that was correct. Even ISIS said it. And the shooters were Tajik. What is your point?
-Yes sir, but ISIS only took credit, they did not say which branch. How could you possibly know they were Tajiks from ISIS-K before even the Russians knew?
Columbo jab aside, here are some follow-up thoughts on the Crocus City Hall shooting now that the perps have been caught and there's more information about what happened.
There has been an unbelievable amount of western censorship and throttling of news about the shooting. Contrast the atmosphere with what happened after the Boston Marathon Bombing. American social media was completely flooded with news about it.But now, virtually nothing. Numerous Facebook friends have told me they were not even aware of the event taking place until they happened to come across one of my posts about it. As I previously mentioned, I attempted to post a video of the compiled footage on YouTube and it was deleted, adding a strike against my account. Instagram has also chosen this specific moment to ban Jackson Hinkle, one of the most popular pro-Russia western voices.It's difficult for me to believe this is a coincidence.
Regarding the YouTube deletions, the footage of the terrorist attack, as upsetting as it is, does not show anything more violent than what is routinely uploaded by both sides of the fighting in Ukraine. The timing between my video being taken down and my appeal denied suggests manual intervention by Google moderators against this news event specifically just hours after it started and was still unfolding.
© The Reading Junkie / An American tourist in Russia
Hamas, Houthis, and the Taliban have all condemned the attack and offered condolences to the Russian Federation, that right there tells you everything you need to know. No plausible Islamic movement benefits from attacking Russia.
What I find to be the most amazing aspect of this story is that the US and British foreign ministries openly admitted to knowing about an "imminent" terrorist attack on a concert hall two weeks ago, but refused to provide any information on it. If I told you "expect someone to attack your house in the near future" then refused to elaborate on what I know, that would me just as complicit in the crime as the people who actually pull the trigger.
For all the trolls saying that this cute warning gets the American embassy off the hook, I invite you to use the same logic for a bank robbery in the USA. "I warned the bank someone might try to rob them in the near future so I can't be arrested as an accomplice." Really, go ahead and try it.
What's even more damning is the near-instantaneous and widespread social media censorship. Most people get their news from social media, and if this was a terrorist attack on American soil, every platform would have been flooded. But aside from regime-approved outlets, no one is allowed to share footage without being banned.
The terrorists were caught in Bryansk, headed toward the Ukrainian border. That tells us that the Ukraine was involved in the attack. It would after all not make sense for terrorists to flee to a country that would just detain and deport them back to Russia.
Speaking of terrorists being caught, in my first post about the attack, I said it was obvious that these guys were not suiciders, they considered self-preservation extremely important, even at the expense of not inflicting as many casualties as they could have. Real jihadists would have fought to the death or at least committed self-sacrifice to avoid capture.
© The Reading Junkie / An American tourist in Russia
Pictured (right): one of the detained suspects. They are allegedly from Tajikistan.
Here's a personal story. A little over ten years ago I attended a US Army class where we studied successful insurgent operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, learned how to make IEDs, plan and execute attacks, basically roleplay as our enemies for a week. One time we were in the classroom brainstorming a car bomb attack and the instructor suddenly asked me point blank how much fertilizer should be in the bomb. I panicked and blurted out "Uhhh, a ton." He laughed and said a bomb that big would level the entire city block and kill hundreds of people unrelated to the intended government target, so no real insurgent would want to do that.
Despite all the propaganda to the contrary, American military and intelligence operatives understand how non-state militants typically think. Indiscriminately killing civilians is counter-productive for a variety of reasons. If nothing else, it makes your cause look bad.
I can confirm this from what I saw in Helmand Afghanistan. The Taliban typically targeted military and government assets and tried to avoid collateral damage. They also used non-lethal force quite frequently. For example, if there was a local guy who was annoying them for whatever reason, the Taliban might teach him a lesson by pulling him out of his car and beating him. Presumably, that was a polite warning to stop doing whatever he was doing. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and is a useful lesson learned.
The main thing to understand here is that international terrorism is almost always sponsored by a nation state. Homegrown terrorists carry out attacks and operations in their own backyard. If you're a fundamentalist, there are plenty of heretics, apostates, and collaborators you can easily target all around you, it doesn't make sense to fly to the other side of the world to carry out an attack that doesn't directly benefit your local cause, and has a much lower chance of succeeding.
It should go without saying that if you launch a terrorist attack against Russia, the USA, China, or whoever, that's going to cause them to inflict more violence on you, not less. Giving your enemy more justifications for violence against you is the opposite of a sensible strategy.
20 years of "Replacing Taliban with Taliban" should have taught everyone that the specter of spontaneous international terrorism is total nonsense. It would be extremely easy for any Islamic group to carry out terrorist attacks in the USA. The southern border is totally open, guns are easy to acquire, and anyone with internet access can learn how to build rudimentary chemical weapons with stuff you can buy in a hardware store. If Islamists really wanted to, they could carry out mass shootings in American concerts every day, and blow up crowded subway stations every evening. Real Islamists don't do this because randomly killing civilians for no reason is immoral and dumb, especially on the other side of the planet. Just the fact that real Islamic terrorists were so hard to come by the FBI had to invent them shows just how rare real homegrown terrorism is.
But when there's a nation state sponsoring the terrorism, that changes everything. They have unlimited resources to radicalize and recruit terrorists. Nation states also have hegemonic control of information so can justify terrorism to a much greater extent than some preacher in Yemen. Furthermore, the USA controls almost every financial system in the entire world. So in this case, we're talking about some guys in Tajikistan who were planning to flee to Ukraine. That means they were paid through networks monitored by the US government. There is no chance in hell they could have moved around that much cash (even blockchain transactions are transparent) without someone at the CIA or NSA seeing it. The US government knew who the terrorists were, and probably their exact identities down to the last person.
So no, that's not a terrorist act Russia could have reasonably prevented, but responding to it is a problem. They'll likely clamp down on immigration and punish Ukraine in some way, but that's not enough. They need to punish and deter USA and its NATO "allies" from sponsoring more attacks like this in the future. If there isn't a sufficiently strong response, these attacks will simply continue.
As a reader of mine pointed out on my Quora page:
Regarding ISIS connection, their Idlib chief Abdulhakim Shishani is currently in Ukraine, pictured near Belgorod border a few days before.Since the shooters were caught in Bryansk fleeing toward the Ukrainian border, and the FSB has stated that there were Ukrainian partners waiting to create a "window" for them to escape through, it seems to be all but a certainty that Russia will directly implicate the Zelensky regime in committing the act. This does suggest a course of action. If Russia pushes for a resolution in the UN Security Council, this will force the USA to either accept Ukraine being branded as a terrorist state, or veto the motion, which wouldn't look good. Regardless of if an UN resolution passes, Russia could legally escalate anyway. By taking these steps, anyone who provides military or financial assistance to Ukraine would be directly complicit in terrorism against Russia.Also the Ukrainian connection is likely due to the fact how the terrorists have got their weapons and also the weapons are quite unique to the Ukrainian theater. At least one of the weapons is an AK-12 and they've got them through the hiding place pointed by the organizers, like Telegram bombers get their explosives from the Uke intelligence.© The Reading Junkie / An American tourist in Russia
And yes, Shishani is known in Syria as a CIA/MI6 asset.
-Boris Sanochkin
(Black Books).