HiddenMysteries: Terrorism: Whose Side is the West on??

The World Will Never Surrender to Terrorism

'Allah Akbar' and 'Death to Russians' Inscriptions Appear in Moscow Metro

Last Monday, 39 innocent people were murdered and over 70 were injured in Moscow, two days later a further 12 were murdered and 27 injured in Dagestan, all in terrorist attacks carried out by Islamic extremists, indiscriminate violence perpetrated without any reason against defenceless people going about their daily lives. However, the reaction from the western press is so shocking as to raise the question, Whose side are they on?

For the UK’s The Guardian*, the attack seems to be almost justified, since it was in retaliation for a “murder” of poor Chechen boys innocently picking garlic in the forests near the village of Arshaty in Ingushetia, so poor that they only had wild garlic to eat (according to terrorist leader Doku Umarov), and the poor little boys in the forest, enjoying the countryside, were murdered by Russian special forces, and therefore, well…

Phrases such as “the misfortune of the four garlic pickers”, “the brutal actions of Russia’s security forces”, “Massacre in woods that brought war to Moscow's metro”, using sources such as “rights groups allege” shows that The Guardian newspaper has descended in a downward spiral from a quality independent source to yet another member of the assimilated press. How pathetic.

So what about a reference to the poor Russian civilians going to work at Park Kultury station and being blown up by some demented 17-year-old pig-faced sow from Dagestan, Dzhennet Abdurakhmanova (photo), married to the terrorist Umalat Magomedov? Both are seen brandishing weapons, after having met on the Internet. Hardly a poor little garlic picking paupers sob story is it? Or the 20-year-old Markha Ustarkhanova, Chechen psychopath, who perpetrated the massacre at Lubyanka?

Where are the words “massacre”, “misfortune”, “brutal”?

Then we have idiotic comments such as the one from a Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, deputy director and senior research scholar at the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University: “Putin’s democratic rollback”. What is this…lady…talking about? Vladimir Putin was democratically elected President twice by a huge majority, today enjoys an enviable popular support rate and refused to change the Constitution to stand for a third term as President, which he would have won.

The biscuit, however, has to go to Andrew C. Kuchins, senior fellow and director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies: “Putin has used terrorist attacks, most strikingly after Beslan in 2004, to centralize the political system and cast blame at the West”.

Or maybe to David Satter, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, who claims that the poor little Chechens’ terrorist attacks at the Dubrovka Theater in 2002 and the school at Beslan in 2004 “were attempts by Chechen rebels to bring about negotiations”. So noble. Like suppose they had written an e-mail instead?

With people like these in charge of western institutions which purport to be leading media outlets and opinion makers, we see that the understanding of all things Russian is not only zero, but indeed is orchestrated by persons with a competence and cultural index of minus sixteen.

In one paragraph, how about the truth?

Namely, the Chechen people voted to remain within the Russian Federation in a free and fair democratic referendum in 2003. Over 95% of them. The vast majority of the citizens of Ingushetia, Dagestan and Chechnya do not support the terrorists because they do not represent any popular movement for freedom. They are common criminals and murderers. And those who blow themselves up will not go to Paradise. They will rot in Hell for the rest of eternity.

And Hell must be visited on these elements wherever they lie. No stone must be left unturned until the last of these sickening cockroaches is eliminated. These cowards must be exterminated like the vermin they are. The response must be implacable and unwavering, determined and resolute. These disgusting sub-human samples of excrement must be liquidated and destroyed. And so they shall be.

For those who support them, then maybe they should be destroyed as well.

Timothy BANCROFT-HINCHEY

PRAVDA.Ru

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The World Will Never Surrender to Terrorism

The explosions that ripped through the Moscow metro on March 29 made us realize that the terrorist threat is not a matter of the past.

Terrorist acts do not have physical damage as their only goal. Terrorists follow their insane and perverted ideas to kill everyone who disagrees with them. They do not distinguish between old or young, military or civil, Orthodox, Christian or Muslim. Those, who send suicide bombers to explode their bombs and kill innocent people, pursue other goals.

A terrorist act is a method, which terrorists use to send their terrible messages to the world. It is a way to humiliate an enemy and demonstrate power. Even if special services have information about a terrorist act, it is very difficult to prevent an extremist attack. Every terrorist act strikes a serious blow on the state.

Any terrorist act is performed to entail a reaction from the general public, from the state and from those, who sympathize with terrorists. The state can make concessions to terrorists as a result of an attack. For example, it happened in Spain, when terrorists exploded a dozen of bombs in commuter trains in Madrid in March 2004. Over 190 people were killed in the attacks. A new government came to power in the country after the attacks and ordered to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq. Many perceived it as a demonstration of weakness in front of terrorists.

State can show a different reaction and restrict democratic liberties within the scope of struggle against terrorism. If it happens, one can assume that terrorists have reached their goals and transformed the society which they chose to manipulate.

A terrorist threat does not limit itself to human losses only. It triggers xenophobia, suspicion and fear among people of different nationalities and confessions. People must unite in front of a terrorist threat and conduct a dialogue to decrease the efficiency of extremist activities. A dialogue between civilizations is supposed to touch upon the general public, young people, first and foremost, rather than political elites.

There is no universal recipe for the anti-terrorist struggle and there will not be. Terrorism changes all the time and meets the reality of today, not of the past. Blocking financial channels, destroying organized structures and terrorist communication networks is essential. However, a victory in the struggle against terrorist requires a lot more: it should be a victory for people’s minds. Terrorists must not see any conditions which they could use to find their followers.

A war against terrorist is a war of ideas. One must organize ideological resistance to extremism – this is a very extensive work and it takes decades. Muslim leaders must educate people on the attitude of Islam to violence and explain the moral values of Islam to everyone. It would not be an exaggeration to say that it is only Islam that can put an end to extremism.

Ideologists of extremism are good psychologists: they skillfully manipulate the problems, which people have in their lives. They can accentuate, exaggerate and distort such problems for their own needs.

A US researcher once compared the war on terrorism with wars on poverty, criminality and drugs. The enemy in these wars is undefeatable . Probably , it is true . It is quite possible that terrorist violence will always exist in the history of human civilization. If it is impossible to root out terrorism does it mean that there is no use in the anti-terrorist struggle?

Of course, it does not. The world will never surrender to terrorism.

Utro

© 1999-2009. «PRAVDA.Ru».

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“The fight against terrorism has not finished”

Some success had been reached recently in fighting terrorism in the North Caucasus, but it is clear the work has not been completed yet, analysts believe.

The blasts in the Moscow Metro are connected with recent counterterrorist operations against militants in the North Caucasus, many observers have said.

Terrorist acts in the Moscow Metro have demonstrated serious faults in the work of law enforcement agencies with getting intelligence in the North Caucasus, believes deputy chairman of the State Duma Security Committee, Gennady Gudkov. He even suggested establishing a special department of the Federal Security Service (FSB) dealing with operatives in the Caucasus.

The practice of sending officers of special services to the region for some months “has not justified” itself either, Gudkov told Interfax news agency. “High-quality specialists should be sent for two or three years on a voluntarily basis,” he said. “Of course, they should receive a very high salary, a social package for them and their families, and guarantees,” the deputy noted.

“A terrorist war” is being waged against Russia, first chairman of the same committee Mikhail Grishankov told the agency. The attacks have been conducted to “destroy stability” in the country, he believes.

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Two terrorist acts followed “a quiet period after administrative and organizational measures had been taken and the special services had actively worked,” Grishankov said. “It seems that the terrorists had accumulated strength and money for attacks.”

“Two terrorist acts in Moscow is a colossal tragedy for the country,” the deputy believes. It shows that “it is necessary not only to continue the fight against terrorism, but to seek new, more effective forms and methods of this struggle,” the deputy believes.

Well-organized structures or small armed groups could be involved in the terrorist attacks on the Moscow Metro, believes deputy Duma speaker and leader of the Liberal Democratic Party Vladimir Zhirinovsky. He explained the blasts by “the struggle against Russia and external factors,” the agency said.

The Islamic factor has not been ruled out either, taking into account the preparation of suicide bombers that is being conducted in Afghanistan and a number of other countries, Zhirinovsky believes. Another possible cause is that bandit groups still exist in the North Caucasus, he added.

At the same time, the struggle of groups inside Russia that are involved in corrupted activities may have led to the terrorist acts too, Zhirinovsky said.

He called for the establishment of a bank of biometric data for all Russian citizens and stressed that his party is ready to support a relevant law.

“It is premature to speak about the causes of the terrorist acts on the Metro," military observer for the Kommersant daily Ivan Konovalov said. It is unclear “who exactly committed them or whether they are connected with arrests of leaders of the underground in the Caucasus,” he told Actualcomment.ru website.

It should be remembered that “there have been other explosions and the derailment of the Nevsky Express train,” Konovalov said. “The only thing that our law enforcement agencies could be told is that nothing has been finished and a long struggle against bandits is ahead,” he added.

This kinds of attack could only be planned by people who have lived in Moscow for some time, said Vladimir Anokhin, vice president of the Academy of Geopolitical Problems. A certain organization, rather than separate shakhids [martyrs], has organized the attacks, he told the website.

However, we have not heard for many years that “a serious hornet’s nest has been detected in Moscow,” Anokhin said. Law enforcement agencies have not been prepared for such a situation, he opined.

Terrorist organizations seem to have decided to speak loudly about themselves as the country is preparing to the celebrations of Victory Day, believes Oksana Goncharenko of the Center for Political Conjuncture. It may be a response to the arrests or elimination of several top militants, such as Said Buryatsky and Anzor Astemirov, she noted.

The terrorist groups may be trying to demonstrate that “they are still active, although all known militant leaders have already been eliminated,” the analyst said. However, their elimination does not mean that the whole network has been destroyed, she said, adding that this is “the most difficult problem for Russian law enforcement agencies.”

http://rt.com/

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Massacre in woods that brought war to Moscow's metro

Luke Harding in Ingushetia reports on the murder of four teenagers that inspired bombings

When the shooting started Adlan Mutsaev and his friends were in the woods picking garlic. They had arrived in the forest earlier that day, together with a group of neighbours travelling in a battered coach. The plan had been straightforward: stuff their sacks, enjoy the countryside, and then head back home to the Chechen town of Achkoi-Martan.

Without warning, Russian commandos hiding behind a hillock opened fire.Adlan, 16, was with his brother Arbi, 19, and their friends Shamil Kataev, 19, and Movsar Tataev, 19. Shamil and Movsar were both wounded. Adlan was shot in the leg, but managed to hobble into a ditch. He hid. Arbi also attempted to flee, but men in camouflage fatigues caught up with him.

According to the human rights group Memorial, Arbi was forced to drag his two wounded and bleeding friends across the snow. Shamil begged for his life. But the solders were impervious. They placed a blindfold over Arbi's eyes. And then they opened fire: executing Shamil and Movsar on the spot. At least two other garlic pickers suffered the same fate: Ramzan Susaev, 40, and Movsar Dakaev, 17. According to his relatives, Dakaev had pleaded to be allowed on the trip with the others. Wearing a bright green fleece, he took a photo of himself in the woods with his mobile phone. It shows him proudly posing against a craggy backdrop of cliffs and trees covered in snow. A little over 48 hours later his body was discovered.

The misfortune of the four garlic pickers was to have unwittingly strayed into a "counter-insurgency operation" conducted by Russian forces in the densely wooded border between Chechnya and Ingushetia. The soldiers, apparently looking for militant rebels who are waging their own violent campaign against the Russian state, came across the unarmed group, brutally killing them amid the picturesque massif of low hills.

Normally this atrocity on a cold day in February would have raised barely a ripple of attention had it not been for the terrible events in Moscow this week. In a video address on Thursday, Chechnya's chief insurgent leader, Doku Umarov, said Monday's suicide attacks on the Russian capital's metro were in revenge for the killings of the garlic pickers near the Ingush village of Arshaty. He claimed federal security service (FSB) commandos had used knives to mutilate their bodies of the dead boys.

Forty people died and more than 70 were injured when two suicide attackers from the North Caucasus set off their devices at stations outside the headquarters of the FSB and Park Kultury.

Russia's counter-terrorism committee yesterday named the Park Kultury bomber as Dzhanet Abdurakhmanova, saying she was also known as Dzhanet Abdullayeva. Born in 1992, she came from Dagestan. Kommersant newspaper published a photo of her dressed in a black Muslim headscarf holding a pistol. It named the second bomber as 20-year-old Markha Ustarkhanova from Chechnya, describing her as the widow of a militant leader killed last October.

Linked or not, human rights groups say it is undeniable that the brutal actions of Russia's security forces have fuelled the insurgency raging across the North Caucasus region of Russia and the ethnic republics of Dagestan, Ingushetia, Chechnya and Kabardino-Balkaria. This largely invisible war has now reached the Kremlin's doorstep.

"People are abducted. People are killed. There are no guarantees of security," Magomed Mutsolgov, a human rights activist, told the Guardian yesterday, speaking from Nazran, Ingushetia's chief town. Law enforcement and security agencies have committed dozens of summary and arbitrary detentions, acts of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, as well as extra-judicial executions, rights groups say.

Typically, armed personnel wearing masks encircle a village or district in a "sweep operation". They force their way into homes, beat residents and damage property. Suspected militants are taken away. Many never return. Others are simply shot, and fake weapons planted on them, rights groups allege, citing interviews with victims and relatives.

According to Mutsolgov, the Kremlin's counter-terrorism methods have proved entirely counter-productive: "Violence produces more violence. It drives people to the militant underground."

The nature of the armed conflict in the North Caucasus has also mutated. From 1994 to 1996 Boris Yeltsin fought a war against mainly secular Chechen separatists who wanted – like the newly independent Georgians over the mountains – their own constitution and state. In 1999-2004 president Vladimir Putin fought a second Chechen war. The aim was to crush Chechen separatism.

Now, however, the Kremlin is battling another kind of enemy. The new generation of insurgents have an explicitly Islamist goal: to create a radical pan-Caucasian emirate with sharia law, a bit like Afghanistan under the Taliban. In February Umarov vowed to "liberate" not only the North Caucasus and Krasnodar Krai but Astrakhan – on the Caspian Sea -and the Volga region as well.

The rebels' tactics have also grown more fanatical. Umarov has seemingly revived the suicide squads used by his assassinated predecessor Shamil Basaev. Last summer a suicide truck bomber blew up Nazran's police station. Another bomber succeeded in ramming the car of Ingushetia's president, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov. Monday's attack in Moscow was the first in the capital for six years.

Increasingly, the rebels are also exploiting a new weapon: the web. On 2 March special forces launched a massive operation in Ekashevo, a suburb on the outskirts of Nazran. There they killed Said Buryatsky, a Siberian-born convert whose jihadist messages on YouTube had attracted a following among disaffected Muslims. Under fire from Russian artillery, Buryatksy recorded a final message for his global disciples.

Yesterday Russian forces had sealed off Ekashevo. But video footage obtained by Memorial shows a picture of devastation: pulverised houses, wrecked cars and alleyways strewn with bricks. After the battle Russian forces displayed a haul of weapons seized from the rebels – together with a blown-off human hand.

Human rights groups are critical of both sides. They accuse the rebels and government of failing to respect human life. Timur Akiev, the head of Memorial's Nazran office, said: "The government's methods have led to a radicalisation of the underground. The rebels now have only one goal: to beat Russia at any price. The rebels and the security forces behave in the same way towards each other. The civilian population is caught in the middle."

Like its imperial tsarist predecessors, who subdued the Caucasus in a sustained and savage campaign of tree-felling and village-burning, today's Russian leadership has little understanding of the region or its habits, Akiev suggested.

He also condemned Monday's bombings. "I don't understand how you can kill Russian civilians in revenge for the killing of Chechen civilians. It's absurd. The people who died in the metro had nothing to do with the conflict."

The Kremlin's response to the metro bombings has been, predictably, vengeful. Vladimir Putin has called for those responsible to be "scraped from the sewers". Dmitry Medvedev, the president, visited Kizlyar on Thursday, a day after twin suicide bombers killed 12 people and injured 28 others.

Security forces should "get more cruel", he recommended. "Quite a lot has been achieved in fighting terrorism lately," Medvedev said. "We have twisted the heads off the most odious bandits. But that, by all accounts, is not enough. We will track them down and punish all of them. We must deal sharp dagger blows to the terrorists, and destroy them and their lairs."

Before Monday's Moscow bombings, Medvedev had taken a few tentatively creative steps in the region, including appointing a new federal envoy. But the key problems remain. There are numerous socio-economic factors driving the insurgency: poverty, unemployment (running unofficially at around 75% in Ingushetia), police brutality, and corruption.

Back in Achkoi-Martan, it took relatives two days to discover what had happened to their loved ones. After hiding for 48 hours in a hole, fed by a spring, Adlan Mutaev crawled out of the forest. Local people discovered him alive on the edge of the wood. His brother Arbi was released by Russian commandos after two days. Human rights workers from Memorial arrived on 14 February, interviewing dozens of witnesses and taking photographs of corpses heaped up in the snow.

Those of Shamil Kataev revealed that he had been shot in the temple from close range. Someone had stolen his mobile phone and passport, as well as a letter from the head of Achkoi-Martin, granting the garlic pickers permission to be in the area. The body of Movsar Tataev was covered in gunshot wounds. In addition there were knife wounds to his spine and groin. Ramzan Susaev had been shot in the chest. His brother eventually found his body lying in the forest.

Unusually, Ingushetia's president Yevkurov quickly acknowledged that several innocent civilians had been killed in February's special operation. He added, however, that security forces had succeeded in killing 18 rebels, and said that the operation had served to increase the stability of the region. Both Chechnya and Ingushetia's rulers have paid the families of the dead teenage boys compensation.

http://www.guardian.co.uk

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“Allah Akbar!” and “Death to Russians!” inscriptions appeared on the walls of the vestibule of the Planernaya station of the Moscow metro on April 3.

A woman called the police and said that she saw several young men spray-painting the inscriptions on the walls of the station. The four men looked like natives of the Caucasus, the woman said.

The men wrote the above-mentioned words quickly and drove away on a silvery car. The police said that it would be difficult to find the perpetrators since there are no surveillance cameras in the vestibule of the station.

In the meantime, Western newspapers write that the fear of Muslims and people arriving from the Caucasus has been growing in Russia after the terrorist acts in the Moscow metro.

The “white” Russians are scared of those people whom they refer to as “blacks” – Muslim women and men, mostly natives of the Caucasus, Switzerland’s Tribune de Geneve newspaper said. The police stop those whose appearance is typical of the nationalities living in the Caucasus: dark skin and black hair.

An imam of a Moscow mosque said that the Russian media equate Muslims and terrorists and misuse terms in their reports. He urged reporters not to call terrorists “shakhids,” which translates as “martyrs,” because they are just “criminals.”

In the meantime, a resident of Dagestan has claimed that he recognizes one of the women who carried out the terrorist attacks on the Moscow metro as his daughter Mariam Sharipova, RIA Novosti reports.

Rasul Magomedov said that a friend sent him a photo published on the Internet of the suicide bomber, allegedly responsible for the attack at Lubyanka metro station, with the words "she was on the metro."

"My wife and I recognized our daughter immediately," Magomedov said, adding that he and his wife had not known where their daughter was for several days.

"Last time my wife saw our daughter, she was wearing the same red headscarf as in the photo."

Mariam was born in 1982 in Balakhan, a village in the Untsukul region of Dagestan. Her parents were both teachers at a local school. She studied math and psychology and graduated with distinction in 2005, before returning to Balakhan to teach computer science at the local school.

"We still can't believe it. We can't even work out what she was doing in Moscow," said Magomedov.

"She was devout, but she never expressed any radical opinions. She always lived at home; we always knew what she was up to."

pravda.ru

Terrorism: Whose Side is the West on??

Monday, April 05 2010 @ 09:22 AM CDT