#chechen rebels

Terrorists Behind Istanbul Attack – From Russia’s North Caucasus Region

Terrorists Behind Istanbul Attack – From Russia’s North Caucasus Region. Is  this just the beginning? Foreign Policy reports that the attacks at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport reveals a significant change in tactics from other attacks by ISIS around Europe. How? Instead of just traveling through Turkey to get to Syria and fight with ISIS, the Russian ISIS members stopped to conduct terror attacks…

By Mitchell Prothero, McClatchy, Sept. 15, 2015

KILLIS, TURKEY--The 15 Chechens looking to cross the border from Turkey to Syria didn’t strike Abdullah as particularly important or unusual.

It was early summer in 2012, and as a smuggler based in the Turkish border town of Killis, Abdullah, who’d fled his home village in Syria because of fighting on the outskirts of Aleppo, was used to secretive groups of foreigners--journalists, aid workers and many recently aspiring jihadists--hiring him to cross Turkish military lines at the border while avoiding what was then still a significant Syrian government presence in northern Syrian.

“In 2012, everyone was coming to Syria and we had too much work leading all kinds of people across the border,” he explained over lunch in Killis, a Turkish town just a few miles from the rebel-held Syrian city of Azzaz. “A lot were Muslims who had come to support the revolution against Bashar Assad from every country. So many from Europe, Russia, Germany, France. . . .”

The 15 men had reached Abdullah through a network of contacts that were funneling new fighters to northern Syria, and Abdullah recalled they said they were going to Syria to assist in the fight against Assad. They were quiet, disciplined and for the most part spoke only a bit of crude formal Arabic.

Only later did Abdullah realize that the network that funneled these men to him was the beginnings of the Islamic State, and that one of the 15 would turn out to be the most important non-Arab figure in the Islamic State hierarchy, a former American-trained noncommissioned officer in the special forces of the nation of Georgia, who’d led his men heroically during the 2008 Russian invasion of his homeland.

Abu Omar al Shishani, as he’s now known, had been born Tarkhan Batirashvili 27 years earlier in Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge, a tiny enclave of ethnic Chechens, known locally as Kists, whose roughly 10,000 residents represent virtually all of the Muslims in predominantly Orthodox Christian Georgia.

But analysts of extremist groups said Batirashvili’s impact has been far greater than the small numbers of Muslims in Georgia would suggest. Since he swore allegiance to the Islamic State in 2013, thousands of Muslims from the Caucasus have flocked to Syria to join the extremist cause.

“More than anything else, Batirashvili has legitimized ISIS in the Caucasus by the power of his exploits, which is amplified by slick ISIS propaganda,” said Michael Cecire, an analyst of extremism for the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Batirashvili’s battlefield successes, including orchestrating the capture of Syria’s Menagh Air Base after two years of failed attempts, “helped to legitimize ISIS in militant circles, including in the North Caucasus,” Cecire said.

“Batirashvili’s ability to demonstrate ISIS’ tactical prowess attracted fighters in droves from other factions and tipped the scales in foreign fighter flow and recruitment,” Cecire said. “In the North Caucasus, young people no longer wanted to fight in Syria with the increasingly marginalized Caucasus Emirate (groups), but wanted to fight with the winners--ISIS.”

Batirashvili’s story also was compelling, Cecire said: “A man with a modest background, sickly and impoverished before he went to Syria,” becomes “a great battlefield commander defying the world” . . . a “seemingly emulable, rags-to-riches story.”

Those seeking an explanation for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s insistence on sending military supplies and manpower to Syria to bolster the government of President Bashar Assad would do well to consider Batirashvili. Putin not only personally oversaw the Russian push into Georgia, but he has twice waged war against Islamist-led factions in Chechnya whose cause Batirashvili has supported since he was a teenager. Ethnic Chechens are thought to be one of the largest groups of foreign fighters in the Islamic State.

Now 30, Batirashvili is a key figure, reportedly a member of the group’s governing council, is said to be the Islamic State’s supreme military leader in northern Syria and Aleppo, and is perhaps the group’s most fearsome ground commander. His current status is an irony for a man once considered a Georgian soldier with a bright future.

“We trained him well, and we had lots of help from America,” said a former Georgian defense official who asked to not be identified because of the sensitivity of Batirashvili’s role in the Islamic State. “In fact, the only reason he didn’t go to Iraq to fight alongside America was that we needed his skills here in Georgia.”

Even before Georgia and Russia came to blows in 2008, Batirashvili had earned a reputation for fighting Russians. While a part of Georgia, the Pankisi Valley’s northern end abuts Chechnya, where separatists fought a brutal war for independence from Russia in the 1990s. Batirashvili’s mother was Chechen, and his father has told local journalists that young Batirashvili had seen a handful of military operations as a rebel in Chechnya before joining Georgia’s military in 2006 at age 20.

The choice of a military career was natural, say Georgian officials and journalists who knew him and his community. Pankisi is a tiny and isolated sliver of Georgia with little economic activity, and the choices for its youth are narrow: leave home to fight the Russians, become a subsistence farmer, join one of the legendarily nasty Chechen criminal gangs, or join the military.

According to Batirashvili’s ex-comrades in the Georgian military, Batirashvili was tapped immediately upon his enlistment to join Georgia’s U.S.-trained special forces.

“He was a perfect soldier from his first days, and everyone knew he was a star,” said one former comrade, who asked not to be identified because he remains on active duty and has been ordered not to give media interviews about his former colleague. “We were well trained by American special forces units, and he was the star pupil.”

Fighting the Russians in Chechnya would not have disqualified him, the former comrade said. “Having fought the Russians as a Chechen is hardly unusual and not the sort of thing that would have meant you were a bad guy,” he said. “It just means you’re from Pankisi.”

None of the people who knew Batirashvili during his military service noted any sort of dedication to Islam or jihadist tendencies, but that’s not considered particularly unusual in a country where Muslims tend to adhere to a moderate strain of Sufi Islam despite Chechnya’s reputation as a incubator of extremism.

“Chechens have a reputation as crazy Islamic warriors, but our Islam has always been moderate,” according to one Pankisi community and clan leader who’s been ordered by the government not to talk about the man many Georgians laughingly refer to as “Pankisi’s most famous son.”

That reputation for moderation, however, began to change in the wake of the Chechen wars, which devastated Chechnya, and by the construction in 2000 of a second mosque to serve the valley’s six small villages.

The new mosque, the community leader said, was built with a donation from Saudi Arabia and “preached a kind of alien Wahhabi-style Islam,” not the Sufi-style Islam that had characterized the regions for hundreds of years.

“It told our people that it was wrong to pray at graves of saints and ancestors, as our people have done for hundreds of years, and even to share our religious rites with our Christian brothers,” he said.

By the mid-2000s, multiple residents say, the situation had split the community, mostly by age, with the original Sufi mosque attended by the older members of the community, while the young people were radicalized by the new mosque. This led to significant tensions with police until it was resolved by a revolution almost 1,000 miles away.

“They all started leaving for Syria,” the community elder said. “Things are safer here now because all the radicals--our children--have gone to Syria.”

American and Georgian intelligence estimates put that number at between 150 and 200 young men who have left Pankisi to fight in Syria.

Batirashvili’s father, who still lives in Pankisi, couldn’t be reached for comment. Local officials who were asked to help contact him said his son had warned them not to let foreigners interview him, and outsiders are easily noticed riding along the single main road that spans the tiny valley.

Batirashvili’s exploits in the 2008 war with Russia are the stuff of local legend. At the time, the region was tense. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and Putin, then Russia’s prime minister, had been waging a verbal war over what Saakashvili called Russian interference in Georgian affairs with its support of South Ossetia, a Georgian region that had declared its independence.

In what is generally seen now as an enormous miscalculation, Saakashvili ordered a Georgian military offensive to retake the autonomous breakaway region. According to his former comrade and the Georgian defense official, Batirashvili led a special forces detachment of forward artillery observers who’d infiltrated deep into South Ossetia to set up an observation post overlooking the Dzara Bypass Road, which connected South Ossetia through the critical Roki Tunnel to Russia.

As Georgian troops attacked the Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali, Batirashvili’s unit rained artillery on the Russian reinforcements that began pouring in to reinforce the break away republic.

The Russians crushed the Georgians within days, but not before Batirashvili’s unit inflicted serious damage, including an ambush on Aug. 9, 2008, that wounded the commander of the Russian 58th Army, one of the highest ranking Russian military officers wounded since World War II.

The story of how Batirashvili left the Georgian army and later ended up in prison for a year on suspicion of arms trafficking is muddled. Georgian military records show that he was discharged for medical reasons in 2010--he’d contracted tuberculosis, according to the records--but some colleagues and residents of Pankisi say the real reason for the discharge were concerns about his family.

By late 2010, Batirashvili was under arrest for weapons possession, which his father told the BBC was merely an old box of ammunition in the house. But prosecutors asked for a significant jail term out of fear that Batirashvili already had been radicalized. Regardless of when this radicalization took place, by the time he left prison 16 months later, Batirashvili reportedly was telling people that prison and his Muslim mother’s death from cancer shortly after his release had convinced him to become religious.

In early 2012, Batirashvili disappeared from Georgia. He told his father he was headed to Istanbul to get away from Georgian military intelligence.

Traveling to Turkey, even before the Syrian civil war, wouldn’t have been an unusual choice. Istanbul had been a destination for Chechen jihadists and gangsters for years. With Turkish roots, Chechens were welcome in Istanbul, able to disappear easily among the ethnic Chechens living in Turkey’s largest city.

“You must understand this about Chechens, they’re really good at two things: Fighting and extorting other Chechens,” said one Pankisi resident. “So if you run a grocery store or a tea shop or some other business anywhere in the world, if you’re Chechen, you will end up having to pay other Chechens to leave you alone.”

“And Istanbul had too many unemployed guys trying to be gangsters all at once,” he added. “But when Syria came along they had something to do.”

A Chechen fighter who spent two years fighting in Syria and currently lives in Istanbul agreed.

“We were all bored and starving here in Istanbul before the Syrian war,” said Ramzan, a huge man with a bushy red beard. He was talking over a cup of tea, buried in the Chechen market on the Asian side of Istanbul.

Ramzan, who asked to not be identified further because of security concerns, had been fighting against the Russians in Chechnya when he was wounded outside of the Chechen capital, Grozny. After members of his family were kidnapped by security forces in the hunt for him, Ramzan decided to flee to Turkey in 2002. For a decade he’d scraped out a living doing low-level extortion and protection rackets.

“Once the jihad in Syria began, people began to tell us, ‘Come to Syria, there’s fighting and paychecks and wives.’ So we started leaving by the hundreds,” he said.

Ramzan fought for nearly two years as a member of Jaysh al Muhajireen, or the “Army of the Immigrants.” Abu Omar al Shishani, aka Batirashvili, was its commander.

“Abu Omar--we never used our Chechen names--was my emir (commander) for two years in Syria,” said Ramzan. “I fought with him in Aleppo and at the capture of the Menagh Air Base. He is an excellent military commander and a very good Muslim. He also helped the Islamic State get many Russian-speaking recruits from Chechnya, Dagestan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and even Afghanistan. He was responsible for bringing them in through a network that I think was controlled by al Qaida.”

Cecire, the analyst, said there’s little doubt Abu Omar found many ethnic Chechens, living in poverty, willing to join the fight. “The ‘poverty’ explanation for foreign fighter flow has taken a lot of flak,” he said. “But in Pankisi and many rural Caucasus regions, that poverty is intertwined with the fame and international demand for the Chechen warrior.” That intersection was a draw for Chechens “in search of means as well as meaning,” Cecire said.

“At rock bottom, it’s no wonder that Batirashvili availed himself of that demand,” he said.

Abu Omar quickly turned Jaysh al Muhajireen into one of the most effective anti-Assad fighting forces, in part by insisting that Syrians be mixed among his primarily Russian-speaking force. The Syrians’ local knowledge and the Chechens’ fighting prowess soon made Jaysh al Muhajireen the leading Syrian rebel unit.

Abu Omar’s string of victories included leading broad coalitions of disparate rebel groups to victory in Aleppo. In August 2013, he was the leader of the group that captured the Menagh Air Base, which rebels had been trying to take for two years.

Yousef, who asked to not be identified further because of security concerns, remembers his time with Abu Omar fondly. “I fought with him for two years, he was like a brother to me,” he said. “He would talk about the best military tactics and why we should never be afraid of dying, because we would go to paradise and marry black-eyed virgins and eat with the Prophet Muhammad.”

But both Yousef and Ramzan said they eventually broke with Abu Omar over his decision in November 2013 to throw in with the Islamic State. At the time, tensions were running high between the Islamic State and other rebel factions, including al Qaida’s Nusra Front. Abu Omar had remained above the fray, but it eventually became apparent that he had sided with the Islamic State.

Still, Yousef, who now fights with a moderate Syrian rebel movement outside Aleppo, absolves Abu Omar of the worst crimes of the Islamic State.

Hello again internet, and welcome to my attempt to make a thing out of this instead of just a one-time article which most of you may not have read. Once again let’s start out by highlighting a headline from the Chechen separatist website to answer the questions that I think none of you are asking. For this instalment, I’ve picked: “German democratic authorities imprison girl's father for her refusal to attend pornography classes”. Whereas last time we delved into the content of the headline, which explains why the word ‘democratic’ shows up here, this time I wanted to provide a broader context for this message based on two questions. The first one is ‘why post this, when there more significant events happening?’ and the second is ‘why single out Germany, are they an enemy to the Chechen separatists?’

  The reason for the first question is that the site of the Chechen rebels isn’t like your average news site, it doesn’t update 24/7 and so the stories to be published on it are more limited than most large news outlets. Why, then, such a seemingly insignificant event compared to everything that goes on in the Middle East, South East Asia and Russia?

  It seems to be part of a minority of news reports which don’t deal with US-Russia relations (more on that later), where similar examples without much in the way of apparent newsworthiness for Chechens appear which fit the ideological point of view regarding democracy which I explained earlier: democracy is a separate religion in their eyes, to which people can convert. Trying to attack the pillars of democracy as propagated by its proponents – justice and equality – they seem to seek out the moral weaknesses as they see them within democratic countries, to serve as a warning: beware, not all is well in The West. Such periodic messages – which like in this case were flaunted as the top story – seem to serve as a reminder of the inherent moral flaws of a society that lets Man, not God dictate law. While their classifying of sexual education as porn or their statement that Democracy demands people should be tolerant of watching sodomy could perhaps use some nuance, reporting on instances such as this one remains one of the rhetorical weapons in the separatists’ arsenal against something which they believe distracts from God.

   The second question concerns whether the Chechen separatists harbour any feelings of hostility towards Germany or the West at large. The answer is what we in academic circles call ‘kinda sorta?’ and that has to do with the degrees of enmity that the separatist movement seems to apply.

  The first degree of enmity concerns Russian military personnel and those loyal to the Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov. Predominantly called invaders and minions respectively by the Chechen separatists, these seem to be the primary targets of lethal military action: they occasionally post reports of how many they claim to have killed, and who are named the prime obstacle to their goal of an independent Chechen emirate.  The second degree of enmity is all about other places of what the separatists consider a legitimate jihad, like Iraq and more recently Syria, where Chechen warriors are not a very strange sight. The third degree of enmity regards the Russian citizens. Though the rebels have recently made statements against attacking civilian targets, images of how they have previously struck against those very targets have gone around the world and although classical Islamic rules concerning warfare condemn the attacking of innocent civilians there have been organizations who called such rulings into question and the negotiations that ended the First Chechen War were helped a Chechen attack on a hospital; it is thus seemingly a potential target depending largely on the political-military realities and the personal whims of the leader of the separatist movement. The fourth degree on enmity appears to be reserved for the west and their allies, in as much that they dislike the culture and are of course hostile to the countries who, in their eyes, are occupying Muslim areas, but who also are not considered targets for attack in their eyes. Perhaps interesting is that America is singled out mostly in a neutral light: because the US levels a lot of criticism against Russia, it seems like they don’t think it prudent to tear down its reputation entirely because that would undermine the value of American criticism against the greater enemy. Whereas some of you might have thought that the Chechens suspected of committing the Boston bombings would be considered heroes by the Chechen separatists, they actually went to much trouble to deny this had anything to do with them and kept on criticising the evidence the FBI claimed to have and blame Russia instead.

Just LOVING it. Because, you know, that's exactly what they want. To be labeled as terrorists who hate the United States.

With the latest developments regarding the suspects identified in the Boston Bombing, reports of the alleged perpetrators’ Chechen heritage are being used by the whole of the mainstream media to draw connections between the bombing and Islamic terrorism. Even despite the desire of mainstream magazines like Salon for the bomber(s) to have been white Americans, the narrative being paraded in front of the American collective is currently satisfied with the meme of the Chechen Muslim fundamentalist. Indeed, in a recent report by FOX News, entitled “Ties Between Islamic Extremist Groups and Chechnya Well-Documented,” the organization states,

Reports that the suspects in the Boston bombing are believed to be from the region near Chechnya may have caught some by surprise -- rebels in Chechnya are known for their violent and long-running campaign to break away from Russia, but not for exporting terror to America.

But congressional researchers and foreign policy analysts have long tracked a connection between the Chechnya region and Islamic extremists with Al Qaeda and the Taliban. If the suspects are indeed Chechen, analysts told Fox News they may represent part of a jihadi network which has made its way to American soil. The report also clearly states that “The ties between major Islamic extremist groups and Chechnya are well-documented, particularly pertaining to extremists' support for the separatists in Chechnya.” Likewise, it was stated by Michael Wines of the New York Times, in an article published as far back as December 9, 2001, entitled “War on Terror Casts Chechen Conflict in New Light,” that “Chechnya's guerrillas are indisputably financed by a web of Islamic charities, banks and other organizations that have served as cash conduits for terrorist groups.” Wines also writes,

On one hand, the Wahhabi takeover here, like much of the Chechen war, was clearly propelled by outside support. Residents say the Wahhabis also had ties to a notorious training camp that indoctrinated Chechens and foreigners alike in Islamic militancy and military tactics.

There are strong indications that the camp and its leader, a guerrilla from the Middle East known as Khattab, have ties to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Yet, although the narrative promoted by both FOX News and The New York Times, as well as the vast majority of the other mainstream media outlets revolves around the traditional notion of crafty Arab Muslims hiding in caves and successfully plotting to outsmart one of the most sophisticated police states in the world, as is almost always the case, these outlets are fundamentally missing the most important piece of the puzzle.