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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Long but extremely informative primer on the Chechen jihad |
| 2005-08-20 |
| On September 1, 2004, a group of Chechen terrorists took hostage and two days later murdered at least 335 schoolchildren and parents in Beslan, a town in the Russian republic of North Ossetia. The atrocity focused world attention on Chechnya. The Russian government used the event to reiterate its arguments that Chechen terrorists and foreign jihadists supporting them have ideological, financial, and operational ties with Islamist terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda. Although President Vladimir Putin and top Russian security officials provided evidence of links between Chechen fighters and Al-Qaeda, European politicians and mainstream Western journalists focused instead upon the Russian army's brutality and dismissed Putin's claims as an attempt to gain sympathy in the West and deflect criticism of Russia's handling of a nationalist insurgency. Putin may have been opportunistic, but he was also correct. A close examination of the evolution of the Chechen movement indicates that Islamists and followers of Al-Qaeda have increasingly sought to co-opt the Chechen movement as their own. Foreign fighters did not have a significant presence in the first Chechen war, which started soon after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and ended with the November 1996 Russian retreat and the creation of an autonomous Chechen government led by the late Aslan Maskhadov. The main Chechen rebel leader during the first war, Dzhokhar Dudayev, had a generally secular nationalist outlook. According to Alexander Iskanderyan, director of the Center for Caucasian Studies in Moscow, "the Chechen independence movement had no Islamic dimension at all." But when the conflict began to attract media coverage, Islamic jihadis migrated to Chechnya. Over the last decade, Islamist terrorists have co-opted the Chechen cause as part of a global jihad. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |