IS-KP attack or false flag: Conspiracy clouds Moscow terror carnage

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The terror group has claimed responsibility, but Vladimir Putin hasn't named it and instead blamed Ukraine and US collusion without providing evidence

Flowers lie in front of the Crocus City Hall on the western outskirts of Moscow, Russia on 27 March, 2024. AP

The grisliest and goriest spectacle that unfolded in Russia on 22 March since the 2004 Beslan school siege is turning out to be a conspiracy conundrum.

Four gunmen killed around 140 concertgoers and wounded another 180 at the Crocus City Hall, in Krasnogorsk, Moscow. The "Tajik" gunmen, arrested along with seven others the next day, were charged with murder and produced at the Basmanny district court in Moscow on 24 March.

The IS-KP took responsibility for the attack on Telegram, followed by the release of a  photograph  of the attackers and graphic  bodycam footage  showing them firing at the audience amid scattered bodies.

Islamic State-Khorasan Province angle 

Formed in eastern Afghanistan in late 2014, the IS-KP derived its title from the ancient caliphate in the region once comprising areas of Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and Turkmenistan. Disgruntled Tehreek-e-Taliban-e-Pakistan members and local fighters with allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—killed by United States (US) Delta Force and Rangers in October 2019—formed the group with vitriolic hatred towards the US, Europe, Russia, Israel and the Taliban.

The IS targeted Russia earlier as well. Vladimir Putin's military intervention in Syria in September 2015 has killed hundreds of IS members in Raqqa, Deir ez-Zor Aleppo, Idlib and other cities and provinces. Besides, Russia is an ally of the Taliban and Iran.

The IS-KP was responsible for a deadly suicide bombing at the Russian embassy in Kabul in 2022. In October 2015, Metrojet Flight 9268, an international chartered passenger flight operated by Russian airline Kogalymavia, blew above northern Sinai. The IS's Sinai Branch claimed responsibility for the attack.

The IS also has a Caucasus branch called the Islamic State-Caucasus Province (IS-CP). Though defeated militarily in 2017, it has some active lone-wolf members. Most of the IS-CP's prominent and  active members belonged to the North Caucasus , in southern Russia. Around 30,000 foreign fighters who joined the IS were from the former USSR with the largest percentage from Russia, especially from Chechnya and Dagestan.

However, the IS was too fast to take responsibility for the concert hall attack. The group usually takes responsibility for attacks after the fate of its attackers is confirmed.

Besides, why weren't the terrorists wearing suicide vests or belts, the standard practice before undertaking a daring operation like this? Wouldn't it have been logical for them to blow themselves up instead of getting caught and brutally tortured?

Angle of American involvement 

A sequence of events beginning in early March also raises suspicion.

In the first week of March, Russian security forces claimed to have  killed six IS members  in North Caucasus.

The US Embassy in Moscow  warned of a terrorist attack  in the Capital on March 7 and urged Americans in Russia to leave immediately. Britain, Canada, South Korea and Latvia repeated the US warning and urged their citizens not to travel to Russia.

A few hours earlier the same day, the Federal Security Service (FSB) " foiled " an attack on a synagogue in Kaluga, southwest of Moscow, by killing two IS-KP members.

A day after winning a fifth term with a record number of votes,  Putin dismissed the US warning  as "provocative statements" and "outright blackmail" on 19 March.

Moscow was rocked by the terrorist attack three days later.

However, despite the Cold War and its second ongoing phase, there has been no history or evidence of the CIA killing Russians in their homeland and the KGB (now FSB) targeting Americans in their country.

It won't be surprising if Moscow directly blames Washington tomorrow. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has already alleged that the US is trying to " cover itself  and the [Volodymyr] Zelensky regime they created with the scarecrow of the outlawed ISIS".

In an article in the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, she wrote: "Attention, a question for the White House: Are you sure it was ISIS? Won't you change your mind later?"

"The American political engineers cornered themselves with their tales that the Crocus City Hall attack was carried out by the ISIS terror group," she wrote. Referring to the US backing the Mujahideen against Soviet-era Red Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s, she alleged, "Considering the international legal ban on direct interventions, it is also about sowing a 'controlled chaos' and reshaping world order by the hands of terrorists".

Within hours after the attack, social media was flooded with allegations of CIA and MI-6 involvement.

The Kremlin's Doppelgänger bot network on X started spreading fake news that the US, MI-6 and Ukraine were responsible for the attack and denounced the American claim of IS-KP's involvement. The network, also called Recent Reliable News, is infamous for targeting the West by disseminating fake narratives and sowing discord.

In February 2022, EU DisinfoLab, an independent non-profit organisation that gathers knowledge and expertise on disinformation in Europe, reported that  Doppelgänger aimed to sow discord  among countries supporting Ukraine in the war and accuse Kyiv of Nazism.

Doppelgänger created fake profiles on X and Facebook to target the US, the UK, Ukraine, France, Germany, Latvia Italy and Poland in English, German, Arabic, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish and Hebrew.

The network, run by Russian companies  Struktura and Social Design Agency , uses fake clones of legitimate websites of media organisations—Le Monde, The Guardian, Der Spiegel and Fox News—to spread fake news and disinformation. Doppelgänger also impersonates public authorities and international organisations like the  French Ministry of Foreign Affairs , Germany's Interior Ministry and  even NATO .

Doppelgänger uses videos, online ads, disinformation articles cloned as legitimate media content, misleading text and biased surveys presented as authentic polls.

Doppelgänger's Italian-language portal Il Correspondente carried an article titled "Terror returns to Moscow" claiming that Ukraine has "become a global centre for recruitment and training of terrorist cells by the United States and Great Britain". Another article alleged that "the terrorists behaved like trained soldiers and used military tactics typical of mercenaries" by accusing Ukraine and the US.

The network's websites also alleged that the West was  deliberately spreading  "fake news" that it was an IS-KP attack. "The New York Times published a fake statement by 'Islamic State' terrorists in which they claimed to be the organisers of the terrorist attack, but used a template that 'Islamic State' has not used for several years", Doppelgänger alleged.

False flag angle like Wagner fake coup

Russia is infamous for launching false flag operations, which disguise the actual source of responsibility and pin the blame on the enemy to launch a war or escalate it. Adolf Hitler used it to invade Poland in 1939, the USSR used it against Finland the same year and Russia employed it to annex Crimea in 2014.

According to reports, one of the four gunmen was seen in a video doing surveillance of the concert hall in early March, when the US warned Russia of a terror attack. But Putin ignored the warning as "blackmail". While Moscow was 'clueless' about the bloodiest terror attack in 20 years all this while, it arrested the terrorists swiftly within hours.

The terrorists roamed for nearly an hour around the venue, which is only 25-26 from the FSB's Lubyanka Square headquarters and around 30 km from the HQ of the Russian internal military force National Guard of Russia (Rosgvardiya) on Krasnoarmeiskaya Street.

Strangely, there were no security forces or checkpoints near the concert hall. The Rosgvardiya took more than an hour to respond to the attack. Russia's has an extremely strong security apparatus and intelligence network.

Russian social media is abuzz with posts  linking FSB to the attack , which could be  used for a second mobilisation  in the Ukraine War by scaring Russians.

According to a post on the Nexta Telegram channel, FSB personnel might have been present at the venue during the attack. "We analysed the footage of the terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall and found that … there are several people dressed similarly wearing blue sweatshirts and jeans," Anna Lena posted along with a picture. Pictures and videos show, at least, four men wearing identical clothes and remaining calm even as the shooting starts.

"They are all calm, not running anywhere and not panicking. In the video, a man in a blue sweatshirt and jeans even pushes a woman who was heading for the exit back into the aisle between the seats. Later, this man starts filming with his phone. You can see that the 'Men in Blue' look at each other from time to time," says Lena.

The alleged Ukrainian  drone assassination attempt  on Putin's life in the Kremlin on May 3, 2023, also pointed to a false flag operation. Russia  portrayed the incident as  "a planned terrorist attack and an attempt on the president" that was foiled by "timely actions taken by the military and special services".

In the  attack footage,  a quadcopter drone, which can carry only a small bomb, explodes above the Kremlin dome. Two men are seen climbing the dome unperturbed and duck down moments before the minor blast.

The sight of a drone entering the no-fly zone in central Moscow and exploding above the Kremlin, which is heavily defended and fortified, was ridiculous.

As expected, Russia unleashed a volley of missiles and drones on Kyiv in one of the most devastating attacks that year.

The Crocus attack also closely resembles the June 23, 2023,  fake coup  staged by Wagner PMC chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, who was eliminated in a plane crash north of Moscow exactly two months later.

Publicly, Prigozhin alleged that the 'coup' was the result of his festering feud with General Valery Vasilyevich Gerasimov, the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, and defence minister Sergei Shoigu. He blamed them for "tens of thousands" of casualties" in Ukraine and accused them of not supplying arms and ammunition during the Battle of Bakhmut.

A  dramatic video  surfaced on social media on June 24 showing Prigozhin flanked by Russian deputy defence minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov and Lieutenant General Vladimir Alekseyev, deputy chief of Russia's Main Directorate of Special Programmes of the President of the Russian Federation (GRU), on a bench in Rostov-on-Don, Russia's Southern Military District's headquarters.

At the base of the Russian Joint Group of Forces in Ukraine, from where the 58th Combined Arms Army is countering Kyiv's counteroffensive, Prigozhin brazenly challenged and humiliated Yevkurov and Alekseyev, who exhaled in apparent helplessness.

The farce ended the next day with Prigozhin ordering his men, who were around 200 km from Moscow, to march back and agreed to an 'exile' in Belarus in a 'deal' brokered by its President and Putin's vassal Alexander Lukashenko.

The coup was as unbelievable as the Moscow terror attack. Wagner entered 'captured' the cities of Rostov-on-Don and Voronezh unhindered "without firing a shot" and the 58th Combined Arms Army, the Rosgvardiya and the Federal Protective Service didn't stop him.

Social media was flooded with pictures and videos of Wagner battling the Russian Army. German broadcaster DW busted them as computer games like Arma 3 or Call of Duty. For example,  a photo  from a security camera showing a Wagner assault on a Moscow international airport was shared more than 600,000 times on Twitter. However, DW discovered that it was a  blog entry  describing a scene in the 2009 shooting game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

The Russian media also claimed that the air force had targeted Wagner on the M4 highway, linking Moscow and Rostov-on-Don.  A video  showing the attack was viewed more than half-a-million times—but it was an Arma 3 clip.

Wagner's main base is in Molkino, in the Krasnodar district, and is operated by the GRU's 10th Separate Special Purpose Brigade. It would be incredulous to believe that the GRU, FSB and Foreign Intelligence Service were ignorant of the 'coup'. The Kremlin, which uses surveillance and forced disappearances to control the masses and eliminates its enemies or detractors in a jiffy, would have sniffed the coup before it was plotted.

Putin's other big false flag operation was in 1999.

In September 1999, four apartment bombings rocked the cities of Moscow, Buynaksk and Volgodonsk killing more than 300 and injuring around 1,000. Putin, who was then prime minister, blamed Chechen rebels to launch the Second Chechen War and boost his popularity with frightened Russians electing him president in May 2000.

In his book Blowing Up Russia: Terror from Within, former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko claimed that the attacks were staged. Subsequently, Litvinenko, a British-naturalised Russian defector, was poisoned with Polonium-201 in London on 1 November, 2006, and died on 23 November.

In October 2002, 'Chechen terrorists' seized Moscow's Dubrovka Theatre and took 912 hostages, and demanded the withdrawal of Russian forces from Chechnya and an end to the Second Chechen War. The crisis ended after Russian security services released sleeping gas into the building, stormed it and killed all the 40 'terrorists'—but 132 hostages also died.

Even during the theatre siege, it was alleged that the FSB played a role. Famous Russian opposition journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who reported on Russian political and social developments and the atrocities during the second Chechen War, told TV host Vladimir Soloviev that her sources claimed the  Russian secret services organised the attack . She was gunned down in her Moscow apartment on 7 October, 2006.

Putin immediately blamed Ukraine for the Crocus attack despite the crime "committed by the hands of radical Islamists" without providing evidence and naming the IS-KP.

In a televised meeting, he said, "This atrocity may be just a link in a whole series of attempts by those who have been at war with our country since 2014 with the hands of the neo-Nazi Kyiv regime … Why after committing the crime the terrorists tried to go to Ukraine? Who was waiting for them there?" he asked.

However, BBC verified several videos and photos of the attackers being arrested 145 km from the Ukraine border debunking Putin's claim of them trying to go to Ukraine.

Even  Lukashenko contradicted Putin's claim  saying that the attackers wanted to enter Belarus, not Ukraine. "They could not enter Belarus. Their handlers knew that it would be a very bad idea to try to enter Belarus because Belarus immediately reinforced security measures," he told Belarusian news agency Belta.

Russian TV channel NTV showed senior Ukrainian official Oleksiy Danilov confirming Kyiv's involvement. "It is fun in Moscow today. I think it's a lot of fun. I would like to believe that we will arrange such fun for them more often."

However, an audio analysis done for BBC Verify by the Applied Forensic Technology Research Group, Liverpool John Moores University, proves that the clip was an edited version of two Ukrainian TV interviews shown in the past week and available on YouTube. The first interview was with Danilov on  19 March. The second was with Ukraine's military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov  three days earlier . Danilov's quote heard in the NTV video cannot be heard in the original interview, showing a gap in the audio frequency data. Besides, information was embedded in the audio file.

Whether Putin will resort to more brutal tactics or do something unexpected in the Ukraine War after blaming Kyiv can't be predicted with certainty, in case, of a false flag operation. On the other hand, if it was indeed an IS-KP attack, it exposes the failure of the Russian intelligence network. In that case too, it is convenient for Putin to blame Ukraine.

The writer is a freelance journalist with two decades of experience and comments primarily on foreign affairs. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost's views.