Why Russia Has Every Reason to Blame the Concert Hall Massacre on the USA

With death toll now above 130 killed, US complicity in the attack must be exposed

On 11 September 2001, the first call to President George W. Bush from a foreign head of state came from Vladimir Putin. His first words to the president were: “In the name of Russia, I want to say to the American people – we are with you.”

That call was Putin’s second to his US counterpart in less than 52 hours. Two days earlier, Putin personally warned Bush that al Qaeda was about to do something big. From a Brookings Institute article on US-Russia relations following 9/11:

On September 9, 2001, Russian President Vladimir Putin called his American counterpart George W. Bush with an urgent message: Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of the anti-Taliban and Moscow-supported Northern Alliance, had been assassinated in Afghanistan by two suicide bombers posing as journalists. Putin warned Bush of “a foreboding that something was about to happen, something long in preparation.” Two days later al-Qaida struck the United States.

Twenty-three years, the US claims it repaid Russia’s gesture by warning Moscow that ISIS was planning a large-scale terrorist attack near Moscow. According to the Wall Street Journal, the official newspaper of the CIA:

The U.S. passed a secret warning to Russia earlier this month of a plot to target large crowds ahead of an attack that killed at least 60 people and injured over 145 at a concert hall outside of Moscow, according to U.S. officials.

That ISIS plot was unveiled Friday night at a mall and concert hall outside Moscow where scores were killed and injured in a gruesome attack largely memorialized in live videos posted various social media platforms.

With Russia-US relations at all-time lows, it’s worth looking at the attack through Russian eyes. Geopolitics, including war, is a strategic game, and strategic games, according to game theorists, is a situation in which one player’s decisions are affected by an opposing player’s decision, thus, each decision must take into account the opponent’s response. While it’s gratifying to ruminate on the way things ought to be and the actions our opponents ought to take (morally speaking, of course), seeing the world only through one’s own eyes is the fastest path to defeat ever devised. Losers assume the opponent will play in their hands. Winners understand and respect their opponents’ skill and resources at denying our objectives.

So how will Russia look upon ISIS’s brutal massacre of 22 March 2024? Will Putin call Biden to thank him for sharing intelligence in advance? (If, that is, the WSJ turns out to be true at all, which is questionable considering the source of the story was a professional liar with the CIA.)

If I were Putin, I would use a first-principles approach to affix blame for the attack much as George W. Bush affixed a degree of the blame for 9/11 on Russia. So, let’s take a stroll down that memory lane for a moment to better understand how national leaders and state intelligence services think. Keep in mind that the US intel community considers Russia its enemy and has ever since the end of World War II. Meanwhile, Russia’s intel community knows the US aims to conquer Russia and break it up into ethnic fiefdoms—because the US has said so publicly on multiple occasions. The partitioning of Russia has been official US policy without interruption since the Carter administration. As a result, the Bush administration repaid Moscow’s advance warning of 9/11 and subsequence assistance in defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan by unilaterally abandoning the ABM treaty, invading Iraq over Russia’s strong objections, and rebuffing Putin’s desire to return some of the status Russia lost after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Again, we learn from this Brookings report of 2021:

Putin’s expectations were considerably more extensive. He essentially sought what Dmitri Trenin called an “equal partnership of unequals,” hoping that Russia’s support for the U.S. would return it to the global board of directors after a humiliating post-Soviet decade of domestic and international weakness. The anti-terrorist coalition was the vehicle, but the longer-term goal was to seek U.S. recognition of Russia as a great power with the right to a sphere of influence in the post-Soviet space. Putin also sought a U.S. commitment to eschew any further eastern enlargement of NATO. From Putin’s point of view, the U.S. failed to fulfill its part of the post-9/11 bargain.

For is part, Bush, influenced by the CIA and Pentagon “Russia experts,” blamed 9/11 on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. His reasoning was a simple, linear “checkers” stream of logic:

1. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan.

2. The US was “forced” to form, arm, train, and fund a resistance (the mujahideen).

3. The mujahideen became al Qaeda.

4. Al Qaeda conducted 9/11.

5. Therefore, Russia is to blame.

Without interruption, the US intel community has worked to isolate and destroy Russia, as the Brookings Institute describes from Russia’s viewpoint:

The Kremlin’s narrative about the root causes of the deterioration in relations since 9/11 is extensive: Washington’s unilateral withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the invasion of Iraq, Bush’s “Freedom Agenda” and U.S. support for “color revolutions” in Eurasia, and the enlargement of NATO to the Baltic states. In other words, the U.S. failed to appreciate what Russia saw as its legitimate security interests.

One such US failure compelled Russia to invade Ukraine in 2022 to establish a NATO-free buffer between itself and the “rules-based order.”

With that history in mind, let’s look at why Putin would blame the US for Friday’s terrorist attack on innocent Russians enjoying an evening at the mall.

First, the US is at war with Russia through its proxy Ukraine. That fact alone would give any national leader suspicion that the US was, in some way, responsible.

Acting on that suspicion, a wise leader would consider who perpetrated the attack: ISIS. And, while President Donald Trump had supposedly destroyed ISIS in his first year in office, elements of ISIS remained. And those elements took responsibility for the attacks only hours after the horror unfolded.

So, where did ISIS come from?

Both the US and Russia know that ISIS was a CIA operation gone wrong—just as the Taliban and al Qaeda were CIA operation gone wrong.

For this, we need to understand the significance of US support for ISIS revealed in 2015 and reported in the Guardian, quoted here extensively:

A revealing light on how we got here has now been shone by a recently declassified secret US intelligence report, written in August 2012, which uncannily predicts – and effectively welcomes – the prospect of a “Salafist principality” in eastern Syria and an al-Qaida-controlled Islamic state in Syria and Iraq.

Did you get that? In 2012, the US intel community welcomed the formation of a “principality,” aka, “caliphate,” in eastern Syria and western Iraq. We continue:

In stark contrast to western claims at the time, the Defense Intelligence Agency document identifies al-Qaida in Iraq (which became Isis) and fellow Salafists as the “major forces driving the insurgency in Syria” – and states that “western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey” were supporting the opposition’s efforts to take control of eastern Syria.

I bolded that first clause to highlight the fact that lying is the chief form of amusement for US and NATO military and intelligence leaders. Again, the Guardian:

Raising the “possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality”, the Pentagon report goes on, “this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran)”.

Mind you, these damning quotes come not from some “unnamed source with intimate knowledge of the discussions,” but from declassified, official Pentagon paper that expressed US desires. The Guardian pieces summarizes the whole affair thusly:

A year into the Syrian rebellion, the US and its allies weren’t only supporting and arming an opposition they knew to be dominated by extreme sectarian groups; they were prepared to countenance the creation of some sort of “Islamic state” – despite the “grave danger” to Iraq’s unity – as a Sunni buffer to weaken Syria.

Did you catch that? The US supported and armed ISIS, encouraged its formation, fed it intel, and conducted false flag operations to advance its agenda. The US did this knowing ISIS was al Qaeda on steroids.

So, from 2012 (at least) until 2017 when Trump took office, the US was publicly denouncing ISIS while secretly funding, arming, and informing ISIS. In other words, like Fidel Castro’s 26th of July movement, the Bay of Pigs, the Ba`ath Party, and the mujahideen, ISIS is a CIA op gone horribly wrong. On 22 March, the CIA’s ISIS project killed at least 133 Russians trying to enjoy a concert and shopping.

Is that how Putin will see it? Is that how Russian citizens will see it? After all, these are not my conjectures or speculations or “conspiracy theories.” These are hard facts based on Pentagon, CIA, and State Department documents. What is left to speculation—or mental connected of dots—is whether the CIA still controls ISIS. If I were Putin, I’d wonder if the ISIS cells allowed to survive agreed to do the CIA’s wet work when called upon.

However Putin interprets this intelligence and events, we should keep in mind that the United States is not the good guy in any of this. As a supposed republic with democratically-elected leadership, it is our moral duty punish those who created ISIS and prolonged its existence. The United States, then, has an obligation to assist Russia in finally destroying ISIS if it so chooses. And, if Russia does not choose to handle the ISIS problem, crushing ISIS once and for all becomes the moral obligation of the United States which created the cancer in the first place.