Islamic State Terrorists Come Home to Carry Out St. Petersburg Metro Attacks
Today’s reported nail-bomb attack on the St. Petersburg Metro, between Sennaya Ploshchad and Sadovaya stations, that killed 9 and injured 20 people, is not the first train or metro attack in Russia.
The emergency of Islamic terrorists out of the First Chechen (1994-1996) and Second Chechen War (1999-2009) has seen extremists attack trains in Stavropol Krai in Southern Russian twice in 2003 killing 48 people and wounding over 200 in two attacks. Then in 2004, on the 6th of February, a Chechen male suicide bomber attacked the Moscow Metro station at Avtozavodskaya murdering 41 people and injuring 120 others. On August 31st of that same year a Chechen female suicide bomber struck the Metro station at Rizhskaya killing 10 people and wounding 50 innocents. Later, on 27th November, 2009, a bomb was planted on the line of the St. Petersburg train called the Nevsky Express and remotely detonated knock the train off the tracks and murdering some 35 people and injuring another 95 Russians. The next attack by Islamic extremists came 29th March, 2010, when two so-called, “Black Widow” female Chechen terrorists carried out two separate suicide bombings on the Moscow Metro at Lubyanka and Park Kultury. Some 40 people were killed and another 100 innocents wounded and maimed.
The likely terrorists in today’s attack are Chechen Islamic extremists out for revenge for Russian and Chechnya’s past wars and for Russia’s intervention in Syria against the Islamic State. It is important to note that St. Petersburg is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hometown. Like everywhere else in Europe, and the rest of the world for that matter, the Islamic State’s foreign fighters, likely Chechens or extremists from Southern Russia, have gone back home to carry out attacks on Russia’s mass transit and tourist centers. In January of this year, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, with defeat pending in both Iraq and Syria, told his foreign fighters to either return home to carry out attacks or conduct suicide attacks against Iraqi and Syrian regime forces. Between 2013 and late 2015, it was estimated that as many as 2900 Russian-born Islamic extremists, from Russia’s south, went to the Middle East to join the Islamic State. There is some evidence, that to get them out of Russia, that Islamic extremists were assisted in their travels by the Russian Federal Security Service, up until Russia intervened in the Syrian Civil War in October 2015. Now the Russian-born terrorists are coming home to roost with the Islamic State propaganda machine celebrating the attack in St. Petersburg today.
Very sadly, this could be the start of a new Islamic-inspired train bombing campaign in Russia and the rest of Europe where the Islamic State has already inspired attacks in Brussels, Belgium, and Wurzburg, German.
