Black boxes point to bomb attack: ISIS has launched jihad against Russia

It has been revealed that a black box on the doomed Russian jetliner exhibited a sudden failure, strongly suggesting that it was indeed a terrorist bomb attack. Elsewhere, it had been reported that US/UK intelligence had traced down terrorist communications pertaining to smuggling an explosive device on board (most likely the luggage bay).

So ISIS has struck its first blow in its promised jihad against Russia...in all likelihood, this information disclosed today has been known by American, British, Egyptian, and Russian intelligence for days already, but held back pending confirmation and, as far as Moscow and Cairo are concerned, political timing.

A hint that the Kremlin has known this was an attack well before today is the fact that it apparently deliberately bombed key civilian targets in ISIS capital of Raqqa, Syria, back on Tuesday, November 3.

No one is surprised by these developments - least of all the Russian government and public, with their long experience of terrorism much closer to home in the 1990s and 2000s during the strife in Chechnya, Dagestan, and other predominantly Muslim parts of the Russian Federation-ruled south Caucasus.

So what now? A CNN breaking news report has pointed out that one positive which this tragedy has brought out is the level of international cooperation: despite their geopolitical differences in the region, the West and Russia have not hesitated to share intelligence and coordinate their security policy, which needless to say has now entailed the suspension of virtually all commercial air traffic from outside the region to not just the Sinai but also Egypt as a whole, even as thousands of British and Russian tourists remain stranded at Sharm el-Sheikh awaiting safe return passage.

So whatever else, the silver lining here is closer US-Russia cooperation over the problem of ISIS, and Moscow could engineer a propaganda coup against those elements in the West who still insist that its goal is not to defeat ISIS but to prop up Assad - at the very least, this attack dispels the loony theory, popular among Western liberals who still cling to their fantasies of Syria becoming a model Arab democracy without Assad, that Russia and ISIS actually like each other because in fact their greatest fear is the power of "free" people (lol).

In a larger sense, Moscow's geopolitical isolation has continued to decline, with even Europe now tilting back toward the Kremlin and away from the White House; perhaps it'll finally dawn on Obama that most of the civilized world doesn't view Russia as a rogue state with a basket case economy that's about to implode any minute that makes big foreign adventures necessary to shore up its leader's approval ratings.