Grim's Hall

Chechnya:

This article from the Washington Post treats the establishment of an armed, Islamist camp in Chechnya. The article is skewed by its timeframe, however. It focuses on the development of the Chechen rebellion since 1999, but pays insufficient attention to the period just before and after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet period was not uniformly brutal, but rather especially brutal in the areas occupied by unfavored minorities (as indeed, the Chinese state is today with its Muslims in East Turkestan, which the PRC calls Xinjiang, "New frontier"). There has been constant fighting since the collapse of the Soviet union. The Russian army found a number of the cities of Chechnya held against them. When they finally broke the last, it was by advancing street by street with infantry and armor, and blasting any buildings held by foes with rocket propelled grenades.

The Russian reconquest has been extrodinarily brutal as well. The rape of both Muslim women and Muslim men by Russian soldiers has been part of the official policy for breaking resistance. It is no wonder that the mid-late 1990s saw the incursion of al Qaeda into Chechnya, which turned into both a rallying cause and training center for the Islamists. Our Mr. Moussaoui ('the 20th hijacker") spent time fighting and training in Chechnya about 1996. When he was arrested in the United States, it was in company with a young American Muslim who claimed Moussaoui recruited him to fight in Chechnya.