PrairiePundit

Newsweek: Chechen spies loyal to the Kremlin have infiltrated Islamic State in Syria and are gathering intelligence the Russian air force uses to select bombing targets, the hardline leader of Chechnya told Russian state TV. Ramzan Kadyrov, who as a close ally of President Vladimir Putin keeps tight control of a mostly Muslim region with a history of rebellion against Moscow, said Chechens had trained alongside Islamic State fighters at the start of the Syrian war. "An extensive spy network has been set up inside Islamic State," Kadyrov's office quoted him on Monday as telling Russia's state-controlled Russia 1 channel. He said Chechnya's "best fighters" had been sent to Syria to gather information about militants' structure and numbers. ... Why would Russia actually put their clandestined operations at risk by confirming this story?  I am sure ISIL appreciates the heads up which makes all the Chechen fighters suspects.  Perhaps this is the...

Bill Gertz: A Chechen jihadist is emerging as a key Islamic State military commander credited with a series of recent military gains in central Iraq that has left the capital of Baghdad increasingly vulnerable to attack. Abu Umar al Shishani, a former Republic of Georgia soldier turned jihadist, conducted what security analysts are calling brilliant battlefield maneuvers, involving feints and encirclement, that helped the Islamist forces seeking to take over Iraq win key battles against Iraqi government forces and anti-Islamic State militias in recent weeks. A U.S. counterterrorism official said Shishani is one of the Islamic State’s (IS, also known as ISIL and ISIS) most capable military commanders. “He seems to have a strong following among rank and file fighters and has shown on the battlefield he understands how to blend strategy and tactics,” the official said. “There are multiple ISIL attacks that have his fingerprints all over them.” Last month, Shishani-led IS forces succeede...

Fox News: The latest recipients of an Islamic State threat are responding in kind, with Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov vowing that "these bastards" will be "destroyed." Kadyrov, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, went on an Instagram rant after Islamic State posted a video threatening Putin over his support for Syria's Bashar al-Assad and vowing to liberate Chechnya. The Muslim strongman, who has fought Islamic militants in his backyard for years, seemed to take special umbrage at a threat aimed at his patron in Moscow. "I state with full responsibility that the one who had the idea to express a threat to Russia and say the name of the president of the country Vladimir Putin, will be destroyed, where he did it," Kadyrov seethed. "I emphasize that they finish their days under the hot sun in Syria and Iraq, and in the first instant of death meet their eternal flames of Hell. Allahu Akbar!" The video that incensed Kadyrov showe...

NY Times: Putin Urges Talks on Greater Autonomy for Eastern Ukraine In an interview Sunday, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia veered between veiled threats and demands that the Ukraine government negotiate directly with separatists. I will take him seriously about autonomy when he offers the same deal to Chechnya.  I do think the chances of that are remote, but bringing it ups show his hypocrisy.  He is just trying to do an annexation on the cheap.

Washington Times: The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee says he’s convinced the Boston bombing suspects had ties to Islamic extremism in their native Chechnya. “The mosque that the older brother attended in Chechnya is one of the most radicalized. The types of doctrine that comes out of that mosque are al-Qaeda-inspired,” Rep. Ed Royce, California Republican, told CNN’s “Starting Point” on Friday. Mr. Royce says that Chechen rebels, who for years have been engaged in terrorist attacks in a push to break from Russia to form a caliphate — an independent Muslim state — for the Caucasus region, are linked “to this particular al Qaeda network.” “They have a wider vision of what they want to do with a caliphate and apparently the older brother, for the six months that he was there, was brought into the fold in terms of that movement,” he said. ... There is evidence to suggest he was already pretty radical before he went on the trip, but it si quite possible he went to places...

Washington Times: Chechen women in mortal fear as president backs honor killings It idiocy of Honor killings should be banned as against human rights. They are a way of allowing abusive men to  kill women family members who disagree with them.  They are a sign of the cultural rot within some Muslim groups.

NY Times: Women in Chechnya are under pressure to adopt Islamic dress, according to human rights activists and an Islamic fundamentalist video circulating on the Internet in the latest example of deteriorating women’s rights under Ramzan A. Kadyrov , the president of the restive southern Russian republic. Activists in Chechnya, where Russia has waged two wars against separatists in the past 16 years, said intimidation reached a peak during the fasting month of Ramadan. There was also a crackdown on violations of Islamic law such as the sale of food before sundown and any sale of alcohol, they said. The activists who spoke from Chechnya insisted on anonymity because they said they feared reprisals. Threats tapered off, they said, as Ramadan ended in mid-September. Men in Islamic clothes had been approaching women whom they deemed unsuitably dressed to pull them by the arm, an offense according to Chechen custom. A woman activist said that incidents she recorded in August i...

Telegraph: In a chilling video posted on an internet website considered to be a mouthpiece for Russia-based radical Islamists, Doku Umarov, a Chechen-born Islamist extremist, said he had ordered the attack on Moscow in revenge for an alleged massacre of civilians perpetrated by Russian special forces in February. The alleged massacre occurred on the border between the southern Russian republics of Chechnya and Ingushetia and saw up to twenty-two people killed. The authorities said it was a counter-terrorism operation and that the victims were Islamist militants but human rights groups claimed the victims were innocent civilians picking garlic in the forest. “Therefore the war is coming to your streets and you will feel it on your own lives and on your own skins,” Doku Umarov told ordinary Russians in the video broadcast. You will no longer ”serenely watch the war in the Caucasus unfolding on your TV screens, serenely watching and not r...

CNN: ... The use of women as suicide bombers or "Black Widows," is one way in which the struggle in Chechnya is different from al Qaeda and more analogous to the military campaign waged by the IRA in Northern Ireland, says Ayers. "This war is politically motivated, it is not about a religious ideology as in the case of al Qaeda, so everyone participates and it is ultimately irrelevant if you are a man or a woman," said Ayers. "They are not like al Qaeda who might say women should be hidden away and have no role in attacks." The "Black Widows" are believed to be made up of women whose husbands, brothers, fathers or other relatives have been killed in the conflict. The women are often dressed head-to-toe in black and wear the so-called "martyr's belt" filled with explosives. They have beem involved in a number of attacks in Russia and first came to prominence in 2002 when they were part of a group of separatists who t...

Ralph Peters: NO matter how gently you pet a snake, it's not going to love you back. And faith-fueled fanatics always show their fangs in the end. Nobody seems to learn. Again and again, states imagine that they can use and control Islamist extremists. Then the terrorists turn against their "masters." That's what happened Monday in Pakistan, when Muslim militants brazenly struck a police academy near the Indian border -- far from the lawless tribal regions. The terrorists killed seven cops and two civilians. Nearly a hundred officers suffered wounds during the siege. The terrorists blew themselves up, rather than be captured. They knew Allah would welcome them. The one captured fanatic meant to die. Pakistan's homegrown jihadis began with local takeovers in the back country. In response, the government -- which had backed the Taliban in the hope of controlling Afghanistan -- tried to cut deals. But the deals only helped the extremists, ceding them te...

NY Times: The men who set fire to Valentina Basargina’s house arrived in the stillness of 3 a.m. There were three of them. Each wore a camouflage uniform and carried a rifle. One held a can of gasoline. They wore masks. They led Ms. Basargina and her son outside and splashed gasoline in their two rooms, she and her relatives said. One man produced a T-shirt, knotted onto a stick. It was damp with gas. “This is for the one who is gone,” he said in thickly accented Russian. Ms. Basargina’s nephew had recently disappeared; the police had said he joined the small but smoldering insurgency fighting for Chechnya’s independence from Russia. The man lit the torch and tossed it inside. The air whooshed. Flames shot through the house. The attack, late last month, was part of what Chechens described as an intensified government effort to stamp out the remnants of a war that has continued, at varying levels of ferocity, for nearly 15 years. In a campaign to punish families with sons suspected of ...

Insurgents, Terrorist and Militias, The Warriors of Contemporary Combat by Richard H. Shultz and Andrea J. Dew makes sense out of the tactics and strategies of tribal fighting from Somalia, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Iraq. I highly recommend the book. The book looks at how traditional intelligence work is inadequate when faced with tribal societies who have their own fighting "doctrines" that bear little relation to traditional western order of battle analysis. One of the factors examined is the differences between nationalism based on abstract principles of civic responsibility and those based on ethnic and religious identity. Most of the current problem areas are in states based on the latter. Somalia is given as the first example. While the intervention in Somalia was based on humanitarian considerations, that intervention had a very different look from the perspective of the warring factions. On CNN and in other western media the famine was presented as a tragic by ...