Dan Darling does a great job of supplying the background info necessary to understand the Chechen conflict. He also delves into the connections between the jihadists and the Chechen nationalists. They run deep. It is possible that Chechens have a legitimate bone to pick with their Russian masters and I don't find it hard to believe that the Russian military is guilty of war crimes in Chechnya. However, the Chechens have chosen our enemies as allies. They chose unwisely. Now is the time to back the Russians in their efforts to annhialate the jihadi movement in Chechnya and surrounding provinces. It will be an ugly campaign, but no uglier than the campaign that wiped National Socialism off the map.

The country [Chechnya] was taken over by a mixture of international terrorist organizations, Wahhabi theocrats, drug cartels, and other criminal organizations that subsided more or less on generous funding from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.

This funding helped the Wahhabis to finalize control over the institutional infrastructure of the de facto independent state and led for calls for the imposition of sha'riah even though most Chechens (and Caucasus Muslims in general) are Sufis. The al-Qaeda presence in Chechnya was headed up by bin Laden's protege Amir ibn al-Khattab, a Saudi national who had previously assisted Islamic fighters in the Tajik Civil War and the Armenia-Azerbaijan War over Nagorno-Karabakh.

Posted by: Rusty at 04:36 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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