...In a statement posted by its Aamaq news agency, the Islamic State group said it attacked a large gathering of “Christians” in Krasnogorsk on Moscow’s outskirts, killing and wounding hundreds. It was not immediately possible to verify the authenticity of the claim.
However, U.S. intelligence officials confirmed the claim by the Islamic State group’s branch based in Afghanistan that it was responsible for the Moscow attack, a U.S. official told the AP.
The official said U.S. intelligence agencies had gathered information in recent weeks that the IS branch was planning an attack in Moscow. He said U.S. officials privately shared the intelligence earlier this month with Russian officials. The official was briefed on the matter but was not authorized to publicly discuss the intelligence information and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.
The Afghanistan connection and the subsequent claims would lead one to believe, if confirmed, that this was the work of the ISIS-K or the Khorsan group. If it sounds familiar, that's because it is. It's the same bastards who killed our kids at Abbey Gate during Biden's disastrous Afghan withdrawal.
Since then, the Taliban have been fighting pitched battles against ISIS-K in Afghanistan. So far, the Taliban’s security services have prevented the group from seizing territory or recruiting large numbers of former Taliban fighters bored in peacetime — among the worst-case scenarios laid out after Afghanistan’s Western-backed government collapsed.The group that claimed credit for the deadly terrorist attack in Moscow on Friday is the Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan called Islamic State Khorasan Province, or ISIS-K.
ISIS-K was founded in 2015 by disaffected members of the Pakistani Taliban, who then embraced a more violent version of Islam. The group saw its ranks cut roughly in half, to about 1,500 to 2,000 fighters, by 2021 from a combination of American airstrikes and Afghan commando raids that killed many of its leaders.
The group got a dramatic second wind soon after the Taliban toppled the Afghan government that year. During the U.S. military withdrawal from the country, ISIS-K carried out a suicide bombing at the international airport in Kabul in August 2021 that killed 13 U.S. troops and as many as 170 civilians.
The attack raised ISIS-K’s international profile, positioning it as a major threat to the Taliban’s ability to govern.
From a poster at ZeroHedge:
WHITE HOUSE: NO INDICATION AT THIS TIME THAT UKRAINE INVOLVED IN MOSCOW SHOOTING
WHITE HOUSE: UKRAINE IS WINNING.
WHITE HOUSE: THERE IS NO PROBLEM AT THE SOUTHERN BORDER.
WHITE HOUSE: HUNTER DOES NOT DO DRUGS.
WHITE HOUSE: VP HARRIS IS A VALUED MEMBER OF THE TEAM