White House: ISIS ‘likely’ bombed Russian plane

The White House said on Wednesday that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is “likely” responsible for the October crash of a Russian airplane in Egypt, in its clearest public acknowledgment of the group’s role.

“While the Egyptian-led investigation has not officially concluded, we assess it is likely that this was an ISIL terrorist attack,” a White House official said in a statement. ISIL is an alternate acronym for ISIS.

{mosads}In response, the Department of Homeland Security will continue to take the “enhanced security measures” implemented after the Oct. 31 crash of Metrojet Flight 9268, the White House official said, “and will continue to work closely with partners to find the perpetrators of this terrorist attack and bring them to justice.”

Wednesday’s announcement is likely to be met with little fanfare, given the long speculation that ISIS was responsible for blowing the Russian plane out of the sky, killing all 224 people onboard.

The official acknowledgement follows suspected ISIS-directed attacks near Beirut and Paris, which have dominated headlines in recent days and prompted a global focus on the extremist group’s reach beyond the land that it controls in Syria and Iraq.

Earlier in the day, ISIS’s English-language magazine Dabiq published a photo of what it claimed was the homemade bomb that took the airliner down. The seemingly simple explosive device was rigged inside of a pineapple-flavored Schweppes soda can.