Think it’s not a global war against an expansionist radical Islamist ideology? Russia disagrees.
A powerful explosion ripped through a half-empty carriage of a commuter train near the Dagestani town of Khasavyurt Sunday, killing a young woman and wounding several people.
Police announced the apparent terror bombing as an almost routine event, the latest of nearly 80 deadly attacks by Islamic extremists that have rocked the multiethnic mountain republic of Dagestan so far this year. The Kremlin insists the wave of attacks that threaten to unhinge Russia’s mainly-Muslim Caucasus region is being orchestrated by the same global jihad groups that have struck in London and Sharm-el-Sheikh in recent days.
[…]
“Our forces have captured or killed citizens of 52 countries operating with the terrorists in the north Caucasus,” says Sergei Markov, a Kremlin adviser. “The enemy brings an ideology of radical Islam that seeks political power through terrorist methods.”
Recent incidents, including a bath-house bombing that killed 10 Russian soldiers in the Dagestani capital of Makhachkala two weeks ago, suggest the attackers have absorbed sophisticated tactics used by jihadis in Iraq and elsewhere. A report issued last week by Igor Dobayev, an expert with the official Academy of Sciences, found that as many as 2,000 Islamist insurgents, many belonging to the Al Qaeda-linked Sharia Jamaat, are behind the wave of roadside explosions, car bombings, and assassinations.
I would argue that this is indeed World War IV, with the oft-feared World War III already having been survived with the end of the Cold War and its collection of multiple hot theaters. At stake this time around is no less than western civilization as we know it. Again.
A secret report by the Kremlin’s special envoy to the north Caucasus, Dmitry Kozak, leaked to a Moscow newspaper earlier this month, warned of the emergence of “Islamic Sharia enclaves” amid the high Caucasus peaks.”Further ignoring the [social, economic, and political] problems and attempts to drive them deep down by force could lead to an uncontrolled chain of events whose logical result will be open social, interethnic, and religious conflict in Dagestan,” Mr. Kozak wrote.
Sharia law. That is what our opponents want to enforce upon the future generations of the entire world. That is, on those that they allow to live at all.
Even within this article, there is finger-pointing to Russia’s tactics in separatist Chechnya. Perhaps, at one time, there was some validity to this. That time, however, has passed.
The first Chechnya war, 1994-96, was effectively won by the nationalist, independence-seeking rebels. But experts say that since rebel president Aslan Maskhadov was killed by Russian security forces earlier this year, the Chechen insurgency is led by Islamic radicals such as Shamil Basayev, architect of a mass hostage-taking in a Moscow theater two years ago and last September’s bloody school siege in Beslan. “We are no longer talking about Chechen secessionists challenging Moscow,” says Mr. Markov. “Now it’s radical religious ideologues who aim to destroy the unbelievers and establish an Islamic caliphate.“
It seems that the United States is not the only one cursed with a blame-America-first, keep-wearing-blinders crowd. Russia certainly has its own equivalent.
“In the [north Caucasus crisis] we can see the complete failure of Putin’s policies,” says Andrei Piontkovsky, director of the independent Center for Strategic Studies in Moscow. “It is a fairy tale to explain it as the work of outside factors, Islamic terrorists from the Middle East, or whatever. The truth is that internal problems are generating social unrest, which leads people to turn to Islamic ideas.”
Internal problems are an issue, but trying to pass it all off as such is ludicrous. The fairy tale is ignoring outside factors with scumbags from at least 52 countries in the fray for the Islamists.
Sooner or later, we will have to wake up to the fact that Russia is fighting the same opponent that has attacked us, attacked Europe, attacked the Asian Pacific, and attacked their own fellow Moslems in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.
Comments
2 responses to “Russia sees Global Jihad on Southern Flank”
Don’t worry, Gunner. We’ll remain asleep until it happens here again. Hopefully, it won’t entail the majority of an American city turning to ashes, or 3 million killed by weaponized ebola. Hopefully, our wakeup call won’t be like a fire-alarm bell clanging wildly in the dead of a deep sleep. That would be a rude awakening indeed.
An interesting note as to who is possibly directing these attacks. He’s a man I only know as “The Uzbek.” He is believed to be residing in Waziristan and chumming it up with Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. The idea that these attacks are not connected with Al Qaida, which many people would like to lead you to believe, is grossly incorrect.