Ilyas Kashmiri strategy behind Dagestan blasts

[Fighter488]

Ilyas Kashmiri strategy behind Dagestan blasts​

By Syed Saleem Shahzad

ISLAMABAD - Twin blasts in Russia's volatile North Caucasus region of Dagestan on Wednesday, following the double explosions in the Moscow Metro on Monday, mark a refinement of guerrilla warfare first seen in Afghanistan after 2006.

At that time, al-Qaeda gathered the best guerrilla fighters of local and foreign origin under the umbrella of Lashkar al-Zil (Shadow Army) and carried out a string of operations that included the Serena Hotel attack in Kabul in 2008 and the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India.

The Dagestan blasts, like the Moscow suicide attacks on Monday, were carried out by the Chechen resistance movement, but the careful selection of a particular target, and through that an attempt to kill other and bigger targets, carries the hallmark of al-Qaeda's Lashkar al-Zil. (A third explosion took place in the Khasavurtsky region of western Dagestan overnight on Thursday, killing two people when their car, suspected to have been packed with explosives, blew up, Russian news agencies said.)

Wednesday's double suicide bombing in Kizlyar, Dagestan, killed at least 12 people and wounded 23, mostly members of Russia's security forces. The first blast occurred when an explosives-laden vehicle did not stop at a police check post. The vehicle exploded when a police car chased and came close to it. The area, predictably, was cordoned off and dozens of security men flooded the site. At that point, a man in a police uniform came up and exploded, killing a much higher number of police men than the earlier blast.

The Lashkar al-Zil was reorganized after the arrival of Ilyas Kashmiri's 313 Brigade in the Afghan War theater in 2005-06, resulting in similar attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan (on the General Headquarters in Rawalpindi, October 2009; at the Parade Lane Mosque, also Rawalpindi, in December, 2009; and on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore, in March, 2009) and India.

The strategy, in which an action is carried out on one target while aiming for another, bigger target, was developed by Ilyas Kashmir. The combined presence of the international Jihadi brigade in Razmak, North Wazirsitan , including Chechens, Uzbeks, Turks and others, along with Arab militants and 313 Brigade, meant finally that it could be expanded to the North Caucasus and to Moscow .

The strategy first surfaced in Aknor cantonment in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, where it was used against the Indian armed forces following the massacre of Muslims in the Indian city of Gujarat in 2002. In attacks involving 313 Brigade, which had divided into two groups, Indian generals, brigadiers and other senior officials were lured to the scene of the first attack. Two generals were injured and several brigadiers and colonels were killed. This was one of the most telling setbacks for India in the long-running Kashmiri insurgency. The Pakistan army could not injure a single Indian general in three wars.

A repeat was seen in the Serena Hotel attack in Kabul in January 2008 (which was carried out by the Haqqani network but masterminded by Lashkar al-Zil), in the incidents mentioned above, and in the December 2009 attack that killed seven CIA operatives at Khost, in eastern Afghanistan.

Ilyas Kashmiri, as commander of 313 Brigade, stayed a few years in Razmak, north Waziristan, with other Central Asian and Arab militant commanders, exchanging notes on the latest guerrilla strategy and orchestrating joint operations under the Lashkar al-Zil.

These are all signals that the attacks in Chechnya this week are the beginning of new insurgency in the region. The Lashkar al-Zil command understands how to perpetuate the insurgency and generate necessary resources. Such insurgencies do not need financial help from state or other donors, instead securing cash by robbing banks or other financial institutions or other such methods. The insurgents then bribe the security apparatus to clear the way for their operations, buy inside facilitators, and so make their targets easy to reach.

Russian Prime Minister and former president Vladimir Putin and Russian security forces were able to crush the Chechen-led resistance in the North Caucasus and had prevented any big operation for the past six years. However, a new battlefront has now opened up in Central Asia, influenced and masterminded by al-Qaeda, and not limited to Russia.

The preparations are comprehensive, with careful segregation of different elements so that a crackdown on one group does not harm another. This is not bad news for Russia alone, but also for America and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies operating in Afghanistan. About 15% of their supplies come through Russia and the Central Asian republics, just where the new battlefront is forming.

Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief. He is writing an exclusive account of al-Qaeda's strategy and ideology in an upcoming book 9/11 and beyond: The OneThousand and One Night Tales of Al-Qaeda. He can be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com

(Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)


Asia Times Online :: Central Asian News and current affairs, Russia, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan

 

[Fighter488]

A wild guess from Pepe or a real possibility?

Fighter


THE ROVING EYE

The Black Widow riddle ​

By Pepe Escobar

They were two Chechen “Black Widows” with dark hair, Caucasus features, not older than 25. They were trained by al-Qaeda Arabs, led by Abu Hanifah, in the Pakistani tribal area of South Waziristan, alongside a bunch of Chechens and Uzbeks who came from Turkey - all part of a long-range al-Qaeda plan to wreak permanent havoc across Central Asia and the Caucasus.

They crossed from the Pakistani tribal areas to Balochistan, and then to Sistan-Balochistan province in Iran - profiting from a deal between al-Qaeda and the anti-Tehran Sunni group Jundallah. From Iran it was easy to cross to Azerbaijan - already in the Caucasus - and then to southern Russia. On Monday, silently, anonymously and out of the blue, the two Chechen Black Widows turned into suicide bombers and became shahidas ("martyrs") in the Moscow subway, killing 39 people and wounding 64.

There's only one problem with this thrilling, Bourne conspiracy-worthy plot straight out of a Robert Ludlum thriller. The Moscow-AfPak connection doesn't make sense.

I make the bomb, you blow up

Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri may well have drawn a complex road map to take over Central Asia/Caucasus, using Chechnya to bring the fight also to Russia. But radical Islam does not necessarily embrace shahidas. In 2008, al-Qaeda's number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, tacitly stated women should not join jihad action. In 2009, his wife, Oumayna al-Zawahiri, in a letter to her "Muslim sisters", explained that if they did they should necessarily be assisting "a male companion".

The "male companion" clue is corroborated by Moscow subway security cameras - they have identified a man suspected of being involved in the suicide bombings. If the Black Widows were not trained in AfPak, they obviously had to be trained by Chechens. And that would have been the work of charismatic master ideologue, Said Buryatsky, born Alexander Tikhomirov.

Buryatsky was killed by a Federal Security Service (FSB - the former KGB) commando in the Republic of Ingushetia on March 2. So the suicide bombings could have been an act of revenge. Buryatsky was the number two to notorious Doku Umarov, who has tens of thousands of supporters and wants to reign over a still-to-be-born trans-North Caucasus emirate. Last year, Moscow solemnly declared the end of counter-terrorism in Chechnya, a semi-autonomous region in the Russian Federation, and proclaimed victory. All the rebel Chechen jihadis seemed to be six feet under.

Not so fast. Last month, Umarov warned all Russians on video that "this war will return to their homes". It did - in central Moscow. And returned not only to homes, but boldly enough, to the Lubyanka metro station - which sits right below FSB headquarters.

For the Kremlin and the FSB, Buryatsky was the mastermind of the bombing of the Nevsky Express train between Moscow and St Petersburg that killed 26 and wounded 100 in November 2009; and the suicide bombing that almost killed Ingushetia's president, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, in June 2009. He may have trained 30 suicide bombers. Nine already died. The FSB is frantically searching for the remaining 21, who are believed to be in Russia, and perhaps Moscow itself.

The shahidas' shadow play

The first Chechen "Black Widow" was Luiza Gazuyeva, who killed a Russian general in November 2001 because she believed he was responsible for killing her husband. Still in late 2001, a notorious Chechen warlord, Shamil Basayev, set up a battalion of shahidas called Riyadus Salihin, with both men and women. Black Widows carried a string of attacks up to 2004. Basayev was killed by the FSB in July 2006.

Alix de la Grange is a Swiss specialist on Chechnya, with countless trips to the line of fire and interviews with Chechen women. She says that if Black Widows were indeed the Moscow suicide bombers, they "were certainly drugged and manipulated by a fanatic. Black Widows are usually young and dejected, they had their husband or family killed, and they have nothing to lose. For Islamists, it's so easy to use them as cannon fodder. That was already the case in 2002 during the hostage drama in Moscow at the Dubrovka theater; the Black Widows were not privy to most of the plan."

As for the Moscow bombs, they may have been detonated by remote control by a "male companion". But de la Grange is sure nobody was trained in Pakistan. [/U]"They don't need to go there, they have everything they need where they are. And traveling for Chechens is very difficult, they are extremely controlled at all borders."

What de la Grange says widely corroborates the study Les Fiancees d'Allah, published in 2005 by journalist Julija Jusik, and based on interviews with families of female suicide bombers: a Black Widow is basically moved by despair, not by crazy adoration of Allah. Jusik also tacitly stated that Chechen men never become suicide bombers. They have used women right from the start of their bombing campaign in 2001. The explosives they use must be fabricated, transported and detonated; they take care of it. They drug the Black Widows. And then detonate their payload by remote control.

That's a key difference between Chechnya and both Palestine and Iraq. No less than 16 aspiring shahidas were arrested in Diyala province in Iraq in 2008; many of their deceased male family members were also suicide bombers. And five years before Jihad Jane in the US, Muriel, a white woman from Belgium, also decided out of despair to become a suicide bomber in Baquba.

The first female suicide bombing is believed to have happened in 1985. It had nothing to do with radical Islam. In countless cases, female suicide bombers are secular - as with the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist outfit, and the Kurdistan Workers' Party in Turkish Kurdistan. The first shahida was a Palestinian, in Jerusalem, in 1995. She was also moved by despair, not Allah.

The hidden hand of Moscow {A conspiracy theory? -- Fighter}

So Moscow did not have an AfPak connection, even though al-Qaeda's game was (is) to establish an Islamic emirate of Khurasan (as in the Iranian province, west of Mashhad) which would unite, once again, Central Asia, eastern Iran, most of Afghanistan, and north and western Pakistan.

The FSB - without mentioning al-Qaeda - instantly blamed the North Caucasus jihadis who want to establish a trans-Caucasus emirate. Few seized on the fact the Moscow subway users are so attentive to the profile of "terrorists from the Caucasus" that the two Black Widows must have been decked out in full Dolce & Gabbana not to arouse any suspicion.

But there's a more disturbing possibility. What if this was a false flag operation carefully orchestrated by the FSB itself?

De la Grange pulls no punches; "In 2002, at the Dubrovka theater, it was proved that with all the controls in Moscow at the time, it was perfectly impossible for a commando of 41 Chechens carrying an arsenal of weapons and explosives to calmly cross the whole city by car without the complicity of the police and the FSB."

Not by accident, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is using almost the same words as when elected president in March 2000: "The Chechens, we will throw them down the toilet". He has just ordered his intelligence services to "sweep the sewers" to find the terrorists. The best and the brightest Russian political scientists seem to agree that the suicide bombings will help Putin to turbo-charge repression all across the Caucasus, not only in Chechnya but also in Ingushetia and Dagestan.

The issue is becoming pressing: On Wednesday, at least nine people, including a regional police official, were killed by two bombs in the restive republic of Dagestan. The BBC reported that a car bomb went off outside the offices of the local Interior Ministry and the FSB security agency in the town of Kizlyar. This was followed by a second bomb soon after in the same street.

For de la Grange, "He [Putin] has two years ahead of him to show off as the country's strongman, the one who will save the population from terrorism - a sine qua non condition to reclaim his position as president. So the attacks could have been orchestrated, or facilitated, by the FSB and Putin himself. There have been troubled alliances before between Chechen rebels, Islamists and the FSB. Anyway we look at it, the crime in Moscow profits most of all Putin and the FSB."

So did the Black Widows end up working for Russian intelligence? And what if these Black Widows were nothing but ... ghosts?

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

(Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

Asia Times Online :: Central Asian News and current affairs, Russia, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan

 

[Bingo!]

Its a Chinese daily, so i buy the news so will most of the members here.

Is n't he one on the fugitive list India has asked Pakistan to hand over.??

 

[Justin Joseph]

Its a Chinese daily, so i buy the news so will most of the members here.

Is n't he one on the fugitive list India has asked Pakistan to hand over.??

yes, a former Pakistani SSG commando.