He stated that at least 100 people were dead from what he had saw. One of the terrorists has a beard, and they were silent. Didn't shout out anything. I believe others described them as "professionals".
Some Russian sources say the beards were fake add ons.
^^ This same source quotes Russian media as saying "this was Khorkol" (Russian slur for Ukrainians).
The US claim of ISIS is highly suspect imo for two reasons:
- You cannot blame anyone without investigation within hours of the attack, especially if you're a foreign country that is at odds with and have a strong bias against the country in which the attack occurred.
- Vehemently blaming a specific group and having your allies chant the same only indicates that you are trying to push an agenda (note how US blamed ISIS while simultaneously absolving Ukraine of any involvement). This is a tactical blunder imo of informational warfare.
If you sit back and think about it, ISIS was a really ingenious move by the CIA. At the time, the biggest homeland security threat to the west was home grown lone wolfs rather than foreign organised terrorists, so co-op the most ridiculously over-the-top group to create a caliphate in the ME and get all your domestic would-be terrorists to self deport themselves.
Then get them to ramp up the ridiculousness to 20 to poison pill the entire cause to young Muslims in the west for a generation and attack everyone in the region to create blood feuds that will keep the Muslim world at each other’s throats for the next century rather than focus against their common enemies in Israeli and the west.
It was a very obvious play, the main reason the world doesn’t see it is because they are still largely fooled by America’s carefully crafted and ruthlessly maintained illusion of nobility and goodness and cannot image the US government being so ruthless. But anyone who has studied American history properly will know that being heartlessly ruthless has always been a hallmark of American imperialism since before the birth of the nation.
I see ISIS as nothing more than an imaginary boogeyman created by CIA/MOSSAD after the previous boogeyman (al-Qaeda) stopped trending. Do covert attacks against your enemies and then put the blame on this imaginary boogeyman man to absolve yourself from the attack.
Al-Qaeda was more real as a boogeyman because it atleast had some actual, verifiable figures who released verifiable statements of intent (i.e. Osama's Manifesto, intent to destroy Israel, etc). ISIS has none of this.
Another interesting thing about both ISIS and al-Qaeda: US claimed to have captured/killed OBL and bury him at sea as per Islamic funerary rites (which btw are nonexistent; there's no such rite), but never provided any proof, and they did the same with Baghdadi. Zero proof. US government even went further to say that it will never release any evidence.
