Moscow. Putin says U.S. Afghan foray achieved nothing but tragedy and loss of life on all sides https://www.reuters.com/world/russias-putin-says-us-afghan-foray-achieved-nothing-tragedy-2021-09-01/
……………………………………………………………… In the hours just before the Guryanova Street bombing the FSB had released a composite sketch of a suspect based on information provided by a building manager. But soon after and with no explanation, that sketch had been withdrawn and replaced with that of a completely different man….As a last resort Trepashkin started sifting through newspaper archives to see if any had run that sketch before the FSB had pulled it from circulation. And there it was.
It depicted a square-jawed man in his mid-30s, with dark hair and glasses. Trepashkin was convinced he knew the man, that in fact he had arrested him eight years before. He believed it was a sketch of Vladimir Romanovich, the FSB agent who had manned the electronic-surveillance van for the Raduyev gang during the robbery of Bank Soldi. As far as Trepashkin could determine, shortly after the bombings, Romanovich had left Russia for Cyprus and died there in the summer of 2000, killed by a hit-and-run driver. Trepashkin then tracked down the original source of the sketch, the Guryanova Street building manager. "I showed him the sketch of Romanovich," Trepashkin said in his sitting room. "And he told me that was the accurate one, the one he had given to the police. But then they had taken him to Lubyakna [FSB headquarters], where they showed him the Gochiyayev sketch and insisted that was the man he saw."Russian authorities had razed 19 Guryanova Street just days after the blast and hauled everything away to a municipal dump. …
In April 2003 Sergei Yushenkov, the Duma member who had hired Trepashkin for his committee of inquiry, was murdered in front of his Moscow home, shot down in broad daylight. Three months later, another committee member died under mysterious circumstances….tried in a closed court Trepashkin received a four-year sentence for "improper handling of classified material" and was shipped off to a prison camp in the Ural Mountains….the two Chechen men tried for the apartment bombings were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. Declaring the matter officially closed, the government then ordered all FSB investigative files on the case to be sealed for the next seventy-five years. https://www.gq.com/story/moscow-bombings-mikhail-trepashkin-and-putin
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How Russia Manipulates Islamic Terrorism
by
Chechnya, Dagestan and Abkhazia To recap. Shamil Basayev, a participant in the fighting in Chechnya since the early 1990s and the leader of the Chechen Salafi-jihadists between 2003 and 2006, was once described as “a GRU staff member with a great deal of work experience,” GRU being Russian military-intelligence. Basayev, with his brother Shirvani, also a GRU agent, led an incursion into the Georgian province of Abkhazia in 1992 that--at the very least--Moscow did nothing to stop. Basayev’s Chechen division helped the Abkhazians expel the Georgian military, and a Russian “peacekeeping” (occupation) force moved in and remains in Abkhazia….
Tajikstan: three witnesses--Abdul Nazarov, a then-officer of Tajik KGB; Kakhar Makhmarov, a senior official in the Tajik S.S.R., and Makhmadali Khait, a then-activist for Rastokhez and now a member of an opposition party in Tajikistan--say the KGB instigated the mayhem to prevent a repeat of the (nearly) peaceful secession of the Baltics and Ukraine.
In June 1990 in Astrakhan, the U.S.S.R. Islamic Revival Party (IRP) was founded. One IRP founder was Geydar Dzhemal, a fiery agitator for Islamist extremism and against Putin to this day, who is the chairman of Russia’s Islamic Committee. Curiously Dzhemal never meets with the legal trouble of, say, Aleksey Navalny. (Analogies with men like Abu Qaqa in Syria will occur to some.) Dzhemal might also be insulated from official retribution by his long relationship with Aleksandr Dugin, the fascist propagandist who made himself famous by calling for a “genocide” of Ukrainians in August 2014. Dugin began spreading his fascist ideas in the early 1980s, supposedly underground. A more convincing explanation of Dugin’s long immunity is that he is a GRU agent. Dugin’s father, Gelyi, was a senior GRU officer.
Chechnya: Movladi Udugov, a leader of the Chechen radical wing in the 1990s, declared the Caucasus Emirate in October 2007 as al-Qaeda’s local branch. “Prior to Udugov’s statements, most Americans did not regard the Chechen resistance as part of the global terrorist movement,” Dmitry Shlapentokh, associate professor at Indiana University-South Bend, writes. Chechen nationalists condemned Udugov’s announcement, asking: “Who could benefit from the provocation entitled the Caucasus Emirate”? Akhmed Zakayev, an exiled leader of the unrecognised Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, Aslan Maskhadov, a former Chechen president, and other representatives of the more secular wing of Chechen separatism consistently called the leaders of the religious radicals in Chechnya agents of the Russian special services designed to discredit their cause. Zakayev levelled this accusation against Udugov; against the ideological leader of the Caucasus Emirate idea, Isa Umarov; and against Isa’s brother, Dokka Umarov, who succeeded Basayev and was the Caucasus Emirate’s leader between 2007 and 2013.
Supyan Abdullayev, another founder of IRP, was one of the major Russian ideologists of Wahhabism/Salafism in the aftermath of the Soviet Union, was a KGB agent from the 1980s. Abdulayev was one of the founders of IRP and was appointed as “President of Chechen Republic of Ichkeria” in March 2007 by Umarov, a “post” that was abolished with the formation of the Caucasus Emirate. Abdullayev was killed in March 2011.
Adam Deniyev was the other major post-Soviet Wahhabist/Salafist ideologue. Deniyev had long been known for Islamist agitation and showed up on the radical wing of the Chechen insurgency. Deniyev went to Iraq in 1992 to study at a time when Saddam Hussein’s regime was intensifying its Islamism. That same year, Dzhokhar Dudayev, the president of the “Chechen Republic of Ichkeria”--which was then exercising some actual authority--went to Baghdad and told the Iraqi regime that their guest was a tool of Russian intelligence, according to Nezavisamaya Gazeta. This can hardly have bothered Saddam, whose intelligence services were trained by the KGB and whose regime trained thousands of Islamist terrorists of all backgrounds in the 1990s. By the time Deniyev was killed in 2001, his being a Moscow agent was hardly a secret.
Russia and Al-Qaeda’s Leader One of the most curious episodes of all is the arrest of Ayman az-Zawahiri in Russia in December 1996 as he tried to visit the Chechen Salafi-jihadists. Zawahiri, now al-Qaeda’s leader, was at the time planning to “scope out Chechnya as a possible sanctuary” for Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), the terrorist group he led at the time which would later merge with Osama bin Laden’s group. EIJ’s cause was on the ropes inside Egypt--not least because Cairo had killed or (as in Zawahiri’s case) exiled EIJ’s leadership. Chechnya at that time was effectively independent, beset by chaos and infested with Muslim radicals: a perfect hideout.
Carrying a fake medical degree and claiming to be interested in the possibilities of the food trade, Zawahiri travelled on a false Sudanese passport, under the name “Abdullah Imam Mohammed,” in the company of two veteran jihadists, Ahmad Salama Mabruk and Mahmud Hisham al-Hennawi. In Zawahiri’s possession was “$6,400 in cash, a fake identity as a businessman, a laptop computer, a satellite phone, a fax machine and a small library of medical textbooks.” The laptop was sent to Moscow and an outcry began from the Muslim world, including Muslim leaders in Russia, demanding Zawahiri’s release.
Moscow released Zawahiri in May 1997 with his laptop and “its mostly Arabic-language documents nearly all unread”. Zawahiri was met in Dagestan by Thirwat Shehata, one of the cell of jihadists who converged on Baghdad in May 2002 with ISIS’s founder, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi….Incredibly, Moscow claimed not to know who it had in its possession until years later. There is no way Zawahiri’s laptop will have resisted Moscow’s efforts to read it. Moreover there is every reason to think there would have been Russian intelligence officers who recognized Zawahiri by sight. “Zawahiri would have had to agree to cooperation with Russian intelligence to save his life and to buy his freedom,” Novikov writes. According to Litvinenko there is a simple explanation for this otherwise-puzzling predicament: the FSB knew perfectly well who Zawahiri was and, so far from intending to hinder him, the FSB provided Zawahiri with training for several months in Dagestan. In February 1998 Zawahiri signed onto Osama bin Laden’s fatwa declaring global holy war against Americans and Jews. Now Zawahiri, regarded by many as the brain behind bin Laden, would become the lead espouser of the “far enemy” school of jihadism, which prescribed attacks on America as the primary goal since she stands behind the local tyrannies, which will fall if America is driven out of the region….
Ruslan Gelayev’s terrorist group, at age fourteen, during a little-remembered crisis in Abkhazia in October 2001 when Gelayev’s forces invaded Abkhazia from the Georgian side. (Another report suggests it was the middle Batirashvili, Tamaz, rather than Tarkhan, the youngest, who fought in Abkhazia in 2001.)
In late 2001 Gelayev’s Chechen forces were ostensibly fighting against Moscow’s allies in Abkhazia, but the net result of the incursion was to provide Moscow the space--while the world was distracted by NATO’s invasion of Afghanistan--to clear the enclave of Chechens and other anti-Moscow insurgents. Since Gelayev was, like Basayev, with whom he fought in Georgia in 1992-3, a barely-concealed GRU agent, this might not have been wholly accidental. In 2009 Irakli Alasania, a former Georgian defence minister, stated plainly that Gelayev and his group were a “weapon against Georgians in GRU hands” during the 2001 events in Abkhazia….
The pro-Qaeda Chechens are led by Murad Margoshvili (pseudonym: Muslem Abu Walid a-Shishani). Margoshvili’s story is somewhat simpler than Batirashvili’s. Involved with the Chechen jihad since 1995, including being associated with Basayev, Margoshvili was arrested in 2003. Margoshvili was—incredibly—acquitted on terrorism charges in 2006, and then managed to get free of an FSB attempt to nab him actually in the courtroom after the verdict. Margoshvili absconded to the Caucasus where he set up a Salafi-jihadist organization in 2008, before moving to Syria in 2012. There is simply no way this happens without the assistance of Russian intelligence. The only question is when Margoshvili began his relationship with Russia’s special services….
Michael Weiss, writing in the Daily Beast, provides new evidence that Putin’s Russia is playing a double-game with Islamic terrorism. Moscow is encouraging and facilitating Chechen radicals to go do holy war in Syria and Iraq, solving a Russian security problem--terrorism in the Caucasus has decreased fifty-percent since the Syrian crisis began--and not incidentally helping Russian politico-diplomatic policy by weakening the Syrian opposition and strengthening ISIS, to whom Russia’s ally Assad can be proposed as the only solution.
Weiss notes the recent investigation by Novaya Gazeta journalist, Elena Milashina, of the village of Novosasitili in Dagestan’s Khasavyurt district, where since 2011 nearly one-percent of the 2,500 residents have gone to Syria for jihad. “Milashina has concluded that the ‘Russian special services have controlled’ the flow of jihadists into Syria,” Weiss writes. “The FSB established a ‘green corridor’ to allow [the Caucasian zealots] to migrate first to Turkey and then to Syria.”
Rather than killing Salafi-jihadists, Russia is pushing them to emigrate, with both carrot and stick, offering to help zealots to serve their holy cause--just not in Russia--and accompanying it with a systematic campaign of harassment for those who try to do jihad locally.
Milashina spoke to the “negotiator” who came to Novosasitili and he told “her of his role as an intermediary between the FSB and local militants in arranging the latter’s departure to the Levant.” In 2012 the “negotiator” helped move the “emir of the northern sector” from Dagestan to Turkey and thence to Syria. “The FSB gave the emir a passport and acted as his travel agent. The condition was that he’d deal exclusively with the FSB and not inform any of his confederates of his true sponsor.” This one “negotiator” sent at least five other men to Syria under the same arrangement.
Though there was an internal crackdown prior to the Sochi Olympics in February 2014, there are many accusations this was accompanied by Russia opening the borders and encouraging the Islamist militants to go abroad. A member of the security forces in the North Caucasus bluntly told the International Crisis Group: “Of course, we did. We … helped them all out and closed the border behind them by criminalising this type of fighting. If they want to return now, we are waiting for them at the borders. Everyone’s happy: they are dying on the path of Allah, and we have no terrorist acts here and are now bombing them in Latakia and Idlib.” As ICG notes: it worked. Russia claims that the decrease in violence in the Caucasus is a victory for de-radicalization, but it is nothing of the kind; Moscow simply exported its jihadists to the Levant, much as Assad had done with Syria’s jihadists to Iraq during the U.S. presence there. These revelations underline the fact that “counterterrorism cooperation between Russia and the U.S. is more a comforting legend of the post-Cold War order,” as Weiss puts it. https://kyleorton.co.uk/2015/09/08/how-russia-manipulates-islamic-terrorism/
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