March 29, 2024 (EIRNS)—Leave it to the Atlantic Council, NATO outpost that it is, to charge that Vladimir Putin is deceiving his people by telling them that it wasn’t just ISIS-K that was behind the terrorist attack on the Crocus City Hall concert. It’s bad enough that people were victimized once by the mass shootings, says author Thomas Warrick in a March 25 article on the Atlantic Council website. But by denying them the truth about ISIS, Putin is victimizing them again, he argues.
Warrick, who is the director of the Future of DHS Project at the Atlantic Council, is certain that Putin downplayed the U.S. intelligence warning delivered on March 7; but even if the attack couldn’t have been prevented, why isn’t he doing the responsible thing now and calling for international solidarity and joint action against ISIS-K? And, he asks, why didn’t Russian security detect the plot and prevent it? Maybe Putin was too distracted by the “destructive” Ukraine war, was “overstretched,” and left Moscow vulnerable. Warrick charges that Putin’s crackdown on Central Asian workers also fueled grievances “that may have allowed ISIS-K to recruit terrorist killers among people already in Russia.”
