After another five guilty verdicts by the UK state censor Ofcom, Steyn's old chums at GB News are belatedly butching up - albeit too late to join him taking the commissars to court at the King's Bench. More on that below.
~The death toll from the assault on the Crocus City Hall currently stands at 137, with another two hundred injured. It is the bloodiest terrorist attack in Russia since the Beslan school massacre twenty years ago - and, as with so many events these days, it makes a lot less sense.
As things stand after forty-eight hours, ISIS - remember them? - have claimed credit for the bloodbath. No, not ISIS HQ, but their Khorosan branch, which is a breakaway group from the Taliban and al-Qaeda, not necessarily in that order. Islamic State-Khorosan, you'll recall, slaughtered even more people as the US skedaddled out of Kabul in 2021. ISIS-K or IS-KP is supposedly keen to overthrow the Taliban, yet in January decided for the first time to expand its operations beyond the Af-Pak region. They pulled off two suicide bombings at events in Iran to mark the fourth anniversary of the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian terror honcho taken out by Washington.
So, not yet three months after picking a fight with the mullahs, they've now decided they might as well tug on Putin's chain.
Hamas, by contrast, is standing with the Russians:
We condemn in the strongest terms the terrorist attack that targeted civilians in Moscow, killing dozens of people and wounding them.
So ISIS-K-POP is now on the outs with the Taliban, the Pakistanis, the ayatollahs, Putin and Hamas. Go big or go home, as they say in America. Odd to find an Islamic terror group with the same enemies list as Nikki Haley. Still, throughout this array of ever expanding battlefronts, K-POPs's modus operandi remains entirely consistent:
*Bannu and Mastung election rallies, Pakistan, July 2018: 131 dead - suicide bombing;
*Kabul Airport, Afghanistan, August 2021: 182 dead - suicide bombing;
*Khaar election rally, Pakistan, July 2023: 63 dead - suicide bombing;
*Kerman, Iran, January 2024: 94 dead - suicide bombing;
*Crocus City Hall, Russia, March 2024: 137 dead - suicide bombing.
Oh, wait, sorry, my mistake. That last one wasn't a suicide bombing. Instead, the Islamic State outsourced their assault on the Russian capital to a nineteen-year-old Tajik hairdresser and his goofball pals, who instead of self-detonating while shrieking "Allahu akbar!" managed to escape in a white Renault. They made it over two hundred miles:
The Tajik hairdresser from Moscow Mohammed Sobir Fayzov is one of the alleged terrorists pic.twitter.com/PC5rFoPlt7
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) March 23, 2024
Does that seem like the coiffure of a professional hair stylist? Is he in a Rod Blagojevich tribute band? Or is it the hair of a crack jihadist not quite on top of his cover?
According to one of the hairdresser's accomplices, all they know is that they were contacted by a man called - go on, take a wild guess - that's right: Mohammed! Certainly helps narrow it down. During his own interrogation, a third Tajik, Shamsutdin Fariddun, confessed they were offered one million rubles for the job, half of which they received upfront. Half-a-million rubles is, in US dollars, just under five-and-a-half grand.
Meanwhile, as widely noted across the Internet, the omnipresent Victoria Nuland, US Deputy Assistant Under-Secretary of State for Who Knows What, just last month marked the second anniversary of the Ukraine war by promising "nasty surprises for Putin" including of an "asymmetric" nature. Paying a gang of Tajik hair stylists less than fifteen hundred bucks per person for a spectacular act of terror is certainly "asymmetric", but, to be honest, sounds far too cheap and cost-effective to be the work of the American Deep State. Then again, with Congress stalling this month's latest hundred-and-eighty-three bazillion windfall for Kiev, maybe that's what they're down to.
When they were captured, the Tajiks had no weapons on them. The fourth man, Rajab Alizadeh, explained that they'd thrown them out the car window somewhere in the preceding two hundred miles.
Does any of this make any sense? Well, we already have a guilty plea:
🚨 BREAKING: Crocus terrorist Dalerjon Mirzoev has just pled guilty to all charges.
Not long till we find out who hired him. pic.twitter.com/xZIWCN9eHD
— Aussie Cossack (@aussiecossack) March 24, 2024
Our own media are at pains to assure us that IS-KP is the new big threat to the west, and that the US State Department has spent March warning the Kremlin that this was coming. Oh, and Putin is as cowardly and/or delusional as any western leader in refusing to recognise this and persisting in trying to pin it on Ukraine. Indeed, granted that he's a chump marking the second anniversary of his imminent downfall any moment now, "Putin must now realise he's been fighting the wrong war." Focused on Nato expansion to Russia's western borders, he totally neglected the threat from Khorosan, an ancient region first delineated as the eastern province of Persia during the Sasanian Empire (AD 224-651) but more generally extended to most of Transoxiana.
Er, okay. Whatever gores your trans ox.
On the other hand, it appears to be a fact that the authorities caught up with the Tajik hairdresser and his white Renault on the M3 near the village of Khatsun, which is about fifty miles from the Ukrainian border. Indeed, there is no reason to be that far south on the M3 unless you're headed to Ukraine - and not the Russian-occupied bits. So, if this is just an obvious Putin distraction, he managed to come up with a fairly elaborate cover at very short notice. And getting the designated fall-guy to eat his own severed ear shows a certain attention to detail...
So:
a) the west's position is that this is an ISIS-K operation;
b) the Kremlin's position is that it's the work of Tajik chancers arrested forty minutes from the Ukrainian frontier.
Are these contrasting narratives necessarily contradictory? For one thing, the BBC claims two of the attackers in the video released by ISIS are two of the chaps in the videos released by the Russians:
BBC Verify has been able to match details of two of the alleged attackers who appear in an IS video and an IS-released still image to videos of the arrested suspects posted on pro-Kremlin Telegram channels.
So, per the Beeb, it could be a ISIS Khorosan job whose perps were fleeing to Ukraine.
Oh, well. This is already beginning to feel all a bit Nordstream pipeline, isn't it? Yet another in a growing list of mysterious events the truth of which will never be known. The important thing to remember is that, like the attempted coup by his now deceased chef, it weakens Putin and ensures that he'll be falling any day now, just you wait and see...
~As many of you know, Mark's first and second Statements of Claim against the UK media censor Ofcom have been accepted for judicial review by the High Court of England. The King's Bench Division will hear the case in June. Many readers have inquired about how to support his free-speech lawsuits on both sides of the Atlantic. Well, there are several ways to lend a hand, including:
a) signing up a friend for a Steyn Club Gift Membership;
b) buying a near-and-dear one a SteynOnline gift certificate; or
c) ordering a copy of his latest book, The Prisoner of Windsor (you won't regret it - ask Kathy Gyngell).
With the first two methods, one hundred per cent of the proceeds goes to a grand cause - and, with the last, a significant chunk thereof. And, in all cases, you or your loved one gets something, too.
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with the death of your nation, live as it happens. Rick McGinnis's Saturday movie date looked at the Second World War in the air, and on Sunday Steyn's Song of the Week had a spring in its step. Our marquee presentation was a special edition of The Mark Steyn Show on identity politics with three of Mark's favourite guests - Leilani Dowding, Samantha Smith and Tal Bachman.
If you were too busy spending the weekend trying to book a Tajik hairdresser, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
