Russia said a video released yesterday by the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS), showing a child shooting to death two men alleged to be Russian spies, resembled a “provocation.”
The video, posted on al-Hayat, ISIS’ media arm, was “doubtful,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said today by phone. “Our security services will be analyzing it closely. It looks like someone wanted to stage yet another provocation against Russia.”
Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, has declined to comment on the execution video. The Russian Embassy in Syria said it can’t confirm whether any FSB agents have been killed, according to state news service RIA Novosti.
However, Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russian security services with New York University, told The Washington Post it was plausible that the men were working in some capacity for the FSB.
“These guys by their own admission were FSB assets rather than officers and the tradecraft described is plausible,” Galeotti said in an e-mail. “The FSB can and does operate abroad in support of its domestic security mission and given the concern about connections between IS and the North Caucasus insurgents, then it is highly likely that the FSB is seeking to penetrate the former.”
Although there was initially some skepticism about whether the killings were faked, Eliot Higgins, a British blogger who has closely tracked the war under the name Moses Brown, told The Washington Post that he had concluded that they were real. Higgins says the boy in the video was featured in a separate Islamic State video late last year, in which he said he was from Kazakhstan.
Yesterday’s video, which was in Russian with English and Arabic sub-titles, showed the interrogation of the two men who confessed to working for the FSB. One of them, who said his name was Sergei Ashimov, said he’d been sent to assassinate an ISIS commander. The second man, Jambulat Mamayev, said he was from Kazakhstan and was on a mission to collect intelligence about Russian fighters and an IS commander.
No bullet holes could be seen during the moment of execution if watched in slow motion and no blood was visible on the light gray clothes of the victims after they were shot.