The Islamic State is 95 percent behind the attack near Moscow. But doubts remain

The Khorasan Vijalat of the Islamic State, which has been operating mainly in Afghanistan since 2015, has repeatedly claimed responsibility for the assassination near Moscow. He also published footage of the brutal attack, which he apparently obtained from cameras placed on the bodies of the attackers. They can be seen shooting people with automatic weapons. Even the United States and Western intelligence are leaning towards the fact that this organization really attacked.

“It was clearly a terrorist attack. It has all the hallmarks of what we call a terrorist attack. That it was the Islamic State is at this moment 95 percent. I am keeping the five percent because we have some indications, some of the mistakes may have been deliberate, so that the attack would go ahead and the human losses and the horror and anger of the Russian public would be greater. But I say, at this point, this is on the level of something that still needs further explanation. So yes, ninety-five percent was a terrorist attack with an Islamist background,” said Mikulecký.

He did not want to comment on the footage from the lobby, which shows a person who strikingly resembles one of the intervening FSB agents, who, in another footage, cuts off the ear of one of the detainees.

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However, he mentioned other strange circumstances: “Firstly, it is very suspicious that four guys with Kalashnikovs and Molotov cocktails could destroy the building in such a way that the roof collapsed. This suggests that there may have been someone else. I have no doubt that it was certainly built with not very fireproof material in Russia, but Russia also has building and fire codes and that building had to be equipped with fire extinguishers. All this indicates that either there were many more attackers than the four that are presented to us now, or that there may have been someone’s interest in making the damage as high as possible.

Mikulecký also drew attention to the slow Russian reaction. “The first Russian police response units arrived an hour after the attack began and after desperate people called the police. There were magnetic frames in front of the hall. This is still a remnant of 20 years ago, when there were much more terrorist attacks on the territory of the Russian Federation. The frames were not functional that evening. The security service is usually there, but they weren’t there that evening. By the way, right next to the hall is a long weapons warehouse for the security service intervention unit that was in charge of this whole entertainment complex here.”

Even though Mikulecký recalled that in 1999 the Russian secret service carried out assassinations on residential buildings as a pretext for an operation against the Chechens, he did not want to speculate in this case.

“The Russian side made a number of mistakes. We have that confirmed. The Russian Federation was warned two weeks in advance by the American and other secret services that a terrorist attack was about to take place. Of course, no secret service in the world has information about what time and at what place this will happen. Vladimir Putin ridiculed the information in his public appearances, when he spoke of it as part of the intimidation of Russia. Of course, all this automatically opens up a whole series of questions. If it wasn’t Russia, we would have said clearly, it’s a conspiracy,” he said.

COMMENTARY: The skeletons in the closet are catching up with Putin – Alex Švamberk

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In addition, Russia made it clear from the beginning that Ukraine could somehow be connected to the attack. According to the Russian version, the four shooters, who were caught shortly after the attack, were fleeing to the Ukrainian-Russian border, where they should have secured passage. The suspects were caught about 100 km from her. Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko, on the other hand, said that they were originally heading to Belarus, but the intervention of the local security forces and the construction of roadblocks forced them to change direction.

Why the four Tajiks, who did not know Russian very well, did not head to the Central Asian region where they came from is not clear. Although they apparently attacked themselves, they do not seem to have planned the entire attack. The question remains as to who and how they were driven.

Both debaters had doubts that they were motivated terrorists. Do they look like professionals who would be able to carry out the action in the way they did with four people?” Mikulecký asked and answered the question himself that no. According to him, however, it was possible to hire them: “These people from the post-Soviet Central Asian republics, who live on the territory of the Russian Federation, are in the position of modern-day slaves. And one can find among them people who are in a desperate life situation and will do anything for money.”

Švamberk suggested that they may have felt they were hired by the underworld: “There are various organized crime groups operating there that hire these people to do dirty work. They didn’t have to suspect in advance that it was going to be a terrorist attack. They may have felt they were hired to intimidate a rival entrepreneur. Even the small amount they received for the event would correspond to this – only half a million rubles.”

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The debaters also addressed the fact that the detainees were brutally tortured. “There was no trial, so we should talk about them as alleged attackers. We are following the rhetoric of Russia, when the scumbag suspects are already convicted and some of them have already been punished, which part of the public would perhaps welcome in other cases, as long as it does not turn against them,” said Mikulecký.

Švamberk recalled that one detainee’s ear was cut off. “The interloper stuffed the severed ear into the mouth of the person, who we’ll call a terrorist suspect for the time being. The Russians themselves released footage of them attaching electricity to the genitals of one of the detainees. They poured water over it to enhance the effect. The Russians aren’t complete idiots, and of course they know that you can’t get the right information out of a person by torturing them. We also experienced this here in Czechoslovakia during the communist trials in the 1950s, when people confessed to complete nonsense just to end the immediate pain and did it with the knowledge that they would get the rope in the finale,” Mikulecký pointed out.

He was surprised that no one responded: “If an allied soldier in Afghanistan or any Israeli soldier had done this, there would have been an incredible storm of outrage and condemnation. This is Russia, and the silence is deafening.”

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Although the Islamic State lost the last territory under its control in southwest Syria in Baghouz in 2019, this did not mean the end of the organization. Its remnants continued to operate in the Euphrates valley and also in the Iraqi province of Anbar and gradually consolidated. Last year, he went from small raids to bigger events. In August, it killed 33 Syrian soldiers in an attack in Mayadin, Deir ez-Zor province, and ten pro-government militiamen in the former IS capital of Raqqa. In the fall, he even temporarily took control of one of the gas fields in Syria. In early January, he also launched a major attack on a religious gathering in the city of Karman in Iran.

“It is necessary to realize that the Islamic State today and the Islamic State as we knew it in its heyday are two completely different things,” Mikulecký pointed out: “The Islamic State was originally an organization with a hierarchical structure, where one human. When I explain it somewhere, I compare the Islamic State to a franchise. When I’m an Islamist and I decide to do some terrorist attack and say we’re some group of martyrs, nobody cares. When I say I’m the Islamic State, I’m sure it will be in all the Western media. This is a plus for those who attack. But it’s also a plus for the Islamic State, which likes to sign up for any action, because it shows – look, I’m still here.”

After the attack in Iran, the Islamic State called for attacks on non-believers wherever possible, and also talked about retribution in Washington, Paris, London and Rome, Švamberk pointed out. “I don’t want to underestimate it, but I wouldn’t overestimate it. The situation is different, the Iraqi government and the Iraqi armed forces already have experience, they know how to fight. And I don’t think that the Islamic State could succeed in what it managed in the past, to control a large part of Iraq and Syria and build its terrorist quasi-state there,” Mikulecký responded, comparing today with ten years ago.

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He stated that it is difficult to fight people who are willing to commit suicide bombings. “Suicide attacks were committed by people who had some motivation, whether it was an attempt to take revenge for something, or maybe they were under the influence of addictive substances, or they had been mentally prepared for the attack for a long time. Sexual frustration is indeed a large part of the motivation for suicide attackers in the more primitive areas. “For a boy who is in his teens and comes from such poor circumstances that he will never get the means to get married, the promise of 72 virgins in the finale can be a tempting way out,” Mikulecký pointed out.

“It’s hard to fight, and the only way to fight human stupidity is education. Today, in the era of smart phones, which even people with low incomes actually have and are able to use social networks, it is about being able to communicate in a language they understand and to educate them, and at least to try to improve their living conditions.” Mikulecký said.

According to him, one of the most dangerous branches of the Islamic State is the Afghan one, which takes advantage of the fact that the Taliban, which rules the country, is not strong enough to deal with it. Milan Mikulecký was in Iraq at the time when the fighters of the Islamic State were being pushed out of Mosul, and he knows how tough fighters are. He said fighting them wouldn’t be nice.

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