- Islamic guerrilla infiltration of Chechnya: separatists, rebels, guerrillas, fighters
- Chechen beheadings and executions of Russian soldiers, ISIS-style
- Chechen attacks: civilian hospitals, murdering students, hostage-taking
For a week or so the Western media, on the subject of the Russian plane that crashed on Sinai, have removed the possibility of its being an attack by ISIS. Why? Why not recognize that Russia is an important partner in the fight against Islamist terrorism.
For a week, almost all the Western media, reluctant as young girls, have done everything to not talk about Islamic terrorism: Even though ISIS has claimed responsibility; even though airlines (significant fact: especially airlines for the Gulf monarchies) announced that they have suspended flights on that route; even though Russian flights to the beaches of Egypt are frequent and had never before heard of any problems or incidents.
Then came the American green light: it was a bomb, said the US Secret Service, to make the jet with 224 Russian tourists on board fall precipitously to the Sinai. An announcement accompanied by other airlines backing out: The English and Irish have stopped flying in those skies, and also Easyjet backed down. At that point, even the free press of the free world has come forward: maybe it was an attack, the papers say. Bravo, seven more.
It’s a process that is not surprising. Indeed, it is an old story. From the second half of the nineties, after the first Chechen war (1994-1996), when theseparatist front led by Dzhokar Dudayev began to be more and more heavily infiltrated by Islamists, and then even funded (nearly every day they opened a new mosque) and organized (some of the guerrilla leaders, however, in perpetual conflict with local leaders, were Saudis or Jordanians) from Saudi Arabia, and of course nurtured and motivated by the brutality and violence of the Russian army.
When I watch the videos of the ISIS executioners I happen to think of summary executions, by Chechens, of soldiers captured in battle, and especially the case of Andrei Rodionov and Evgenyj Trusov, two Russian soldiers captured in Chechnya and beheaded, recorded on film, while two of their fellow soldiers were simply shot. For Rodionov, who was assassinated on his twentieth birthday, there hangs in Russia a “cause of holiness” because near death, the soldier refused to renounce the Christian faith and convert to Islam.
The Chechen guerrillas, as everyone remembers, whether their cause was right or wrong, were committing actions worthy of the worst terrorism:
- attacking civilian hospitals (in Budionnovsk),
- murdering students in schools (in Beslan),
- taking the audience hostage in the theaters (in Moscow).
Their leaders, meanwhile, dreamed of creating a caliphate in the Caucasus, at least fifteen years before Al Baghdadi dreamed of creating another one between Syria and Iraq.
Despite all this, and much more that could be said, the Western world has always refused to recognize that Russia has had to fight Islamic terrorism, and in part, still has to. The Chechens were from time to time “separatists,” “rebels”, “guerrillas”, “fighters”. Anything but “Islamic terrorists,” a qualification that over time we have come to attribute to almost anyone brandishing a weapon.
The reason is obvious: to de-legitimize Russia, to remove any form of international recognition, to deny even to the point of ridicule that Russia would / could have a role in a common struggle alongside the West. Instead, to leave a free hand to the United States in that sort of perennial and cruel sociological experiment that they are conducting in the Middle East and that, from George Bush to Barack Obama, has had the self-same outcome:
- fragmentation where there was unity (Iraq, Syria, Libya … ),
- impoverishment where there was a decent standard of living,
- ever sharper contrasts between religions, ethnic groups, and people.
This is the policy that, among other things, could lead to the extinction of Christian communities in the Middle East. Christian communities that, among other things, served as cultural and social glue in those countries that were somehow united before, but now on their way to a de facto partition (Iraq, Libya) or even pursued and searched out as in Syria.
