The Islamic state has stated that ‘’the rivers will run with blood’’, as Assad continues to advance in the strategically important region of Aleppo with the help of Moscow.
Originally appeared at Politika.rs, translated by Цвеја exclusively for SouthFront
‘’Soon, very soon the rivers will run with blood’’, is the sentence spoken in Russian on yesterdays posted video in which the Islamic state (IS) has threatened Russia that it will soonperform an attack on Russian soil.
The IS has been threatening Russia with these attack even before Moscow started a military intervention in Syria, in which the jihadist organization occupied a large part of the territory as it does in Iraq. Western reporters believe that the Egyptian branch of the IS, the so called Wilayat Sinai, has already succeeded in getting revenge on Russia for their actions by planting a bomb in the Russian plane in which, after taking off from the summer resort Sahl el sheikh, 224 people died.
The Kremlin has not yet accepted this version as the cause of the tragedy, the largest one in Russian aviation, instead Russia awaits the results of the official investigation before jumping to conclusions, high ranking officials said.
The terrorist’s threats, however, have echoed through the Russian public. The Russians haven’t forgotten the terrible pictures from the Moscow theatre, the Beslan school and other scenes of Islamic terrorist atrocities on their soil during the last 15 years in which hundreds of people died.
In that time, Vladimir Putin was just at the beginning of his rule. The liquidation of the terrorists in Moscow and Belsan – regardless of the huge number of hostages killed during the operations of the security forces – helped him rise to greater power, as well as what came next in the name of fighting terrorists: controlling the media, narrowing individual rights and extending the surveillance of reporters, as the western media says. But, those countries took similar actions after the September 11 attacks.
In a manner similar to the conspiracy theories according to which George Bush is responsible for the destruction of the ‘’twins’’ in New York, some prominent American news outlets even speculated that the Russian defensive force might have organized some of those attacks in order to give Putin an excuse for the war in Chechnya and for strengthening his own personal power. Now the western media waits to see if the crash of the Russian plane, attributed to the IS bomb, will give Putin a reason to slowly retreat from Syria or charge with full force on Assad’s enemies, even on the Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s ‘’khalifat’’, on which positions Russian projectiles are landing in much smaller numbers than on the other Syrian rebels.
For now, Russian planes are still supporting the ground offensive of the Syrian president and his allies from the Lebanese militia the Hezbollah – according to unofficial reports Iranian troops are there as well. The most fearsome battles happened yesterday in the strategically important province of Aleppo, where three day ago the SAA managed to break through to a military base (remark: Kuweires Airbase) which the IS held under siege for over two years. Assad yesterday captured in the same area the town of Al-Hadher, forcing the rebels not related to the ‘’khalifat’’ to retreat.
However, on the larger part of the front where Russian planes operate, regardless of the initial advance right after their air attacks, Assad did not make any big break throughs and in some parts was even forced to retreat. The Russian intervention did not drastically change the situation, so Moscow will, especially after the IS threat, find their selves questioning if they should engange into the conflict even more like the US did, which also isn’t succeeding in resolving the conflict by supporting their assets in Syria. In turn, however, Russia might face the risk of the Jihadists making their threats a reality.
The threat of IS is even more credible to Russia since IS has been known to have five to seven thousand fighters from former soviet republics in their ranks.
