Three facts stand out as clear amid the lack of hard information about the perpetrators of Friday’s appalling terrorist attack on Russia, and all three shine a light on dangers inherent in the new multipolar world we now inhabit.

Soon after Friday’s terrorist attack killed at least 137 people in Moscow, Russian pundits and politicians insinuated that the attackers had links to Ukraine. This came as little surprise. It has become standard for the Kremlin to blame Ukraine for Russia’s internal blunders and accuse it of making common cause with nefarious forces.

Friday’s terrorist attack at the Crocus City Hall concert venue near Moscow killed more than 100 people in a brutal crime against humanity. Many key facts are still unclear, and rest assured they will become only less clear as the Kremlin works to exploit the crisis domestically and abroad.

Coming shortly after his latest sham election, the attack gave dictator Vladimir Putin a rallying cry one day after the Kremlin declared for the first time that Russia is in a “state of war” in Ukraine.

The U.S. has intelligence confirming Islamic State's claim of responsibility for a deadly shooting attack at a concert near Moscow on Friday, a U.S. official told Reuters.

Here is information about the Islamic State's Afghan branch known as ISIS-K and their motives for attacking Russia:

WHAT IS ISIS-K?

Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K), named after an old term for the region that included parts of Iran, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, emerged in eastern Afghanistan in late 2014 and quickly established a reputation for extreme brutality.

As the world absorbs the horror of the ISIS-K slaughter inside a Russian concert hall, prominent members of Congress are warning the Afghan-based terror group could strike inside the United States.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Mike McCaul said Sunday the threat of an attack was heightened by President Joe Biden‘s bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan, which gave ISIS-K  a breeding ground to train and carry out attacks.

Five years ago this month, an American-backed Kurdish and Arab militia ousted Islamic State fighters from a village in eastern Syria, the group’s last sliver of territory.

Since then, the organization that once staked out a self-proclaimed caliphate across Iraq and Syria has metastasized into a more traditional terrorist group — a clandestine network of cells from West Africa to Southeast Asia engaged in guerrilla attacks, bombings and targeted assassinations.

Russia’s security services say they have arrested four gunmen responsible for the shooting that killed at least 115 people at a concert hall on the outskirts of Moscow, in one of the worst terror attacks in the country’s history.

The director of Russia’s federal security service (FSB) informed Vladimir Putin that 11 individuals had been arrested in connection with Friday’s terrorist attack at the Crocus City Hall outside Moscow, including four suspects involved in the shooting.

Russian authorities said they had detained 11 people in connection with a terrorist attack on a concert hall in a Moscow suburb, as the death toll from the Friday night assault rose to 115, investigators said.

Among those taken into custody were four people who prosecutors said played a direct role in the violence, in which gunmen shot audience members at close range and set off smoke bombs.

Russia’s Investigative Committee has claimed that the number of deaths following Friday evening’s massacre at the Crocus City concert hall near Moscow has been confirmed at 115 people and warned that this figure is likely to rise.

The service had previously stated that the death toll was 93, but later issued an update announcing that additional bodies were found after emergency services started clearing the rubble.

Russia’s FSB security service said Thursday it had killed Islamic State militants who were planning a “terrorist attack” on a Moscow synagogue, Russian state news agencies reported.

The FSB said an ISIS cell based in Kaluga, southwest of Moscow, had been planning to shoot Jewish worshippers at a synagogue in the capital.

“While being arrested, the terrorists put up armed resistance to the Russian FSB officers, and as a result were neutralized by return fire,” the state-owned TASS news agency quoted the security service as saying in a statement.