S. Ossetian leader admits to arms from Russia

[khalampre]

Now why cant we nail Russias ass to the wall for this?


S. Ossetian leader admits to arms from Russia
In an interview with the Russian paper Kommersant published on September 26, the Speaker of the de fact Parliament of South Ossetia Znaur Gassiev acknowledged that Russia has provided it with arms. "Russia armed us well, I won't hide it," he is quoted as saying.
Gassiev said that South Ossetia was caught in the middle of a confrontation between Russia and the United States but still aims for unification with North Ossetia and accession in Russia. "America is defending Georgia's interests, and we are defending Russia's interests and our own. We are a divided people that wants to be united," he said.
Asked if Russia will help South Ossetia, Gassiev replies, "Not only will it help, it is helping now. Why pretend otherwise? In 1991, we faced the Georgians with sticks and slingshots, because we didn't have any weapons. A year ago, things were different. They had to withdraw. Now even more. Were you at the parade? Did you see the equipment?… And Russia armed us well, I won't hide it."
The speaker also claims that the United States intervened in August 2004 demanding that Georgia withdrawal troops from the South Ossetian conflict zone. "The U.S. ambassador to the OSCE told me that when he was here," he said.
Nonethelees, Gassiev says that there is still a "50/50" chance for reunification with Georgia depending on what Tbilisi agrees to and what guarantees it provides. "Everything is in God's power, everything is possible. Here it is still 50/50. Russia or Georgia," he says.

[lightstalker]

In 1991, we faced the Georgians with sticks and slingshots, because we didn't have any weapons. A year ago

ohhhh reallyy...

So in 1992 the Ossetians chucked the Ingush out of Prigorodny with sticks and slingshots?..

Bullshit.

[khalampre]

Yesterday it is ok for S ossetia to get arms from Russia, but today it is bad for Georgia to get US arms.


South Ossetia appeals to U.S. for arms control
Foreign Minister of the de-facto republic of South Ossetia Murat Jioev has sent a note to the U.S. Embassy in Georgia that reads that NATO armament was used during the September 20 bombardment of Tskhinvali.
"The actions of the Georgian side taken against South Ossetia during the celebrations of the 15th anniversary of the formation of the republic were a provocation and a violation of all agreements, including those that provide for the non-use of US armaments for the resolution of the conflict," he added.
He stated that on the morning of September 19 gunfire occurred on the southern outskirts of Tskhinvali, injuring two civilians. "For this, American M-16 rifles had been used. The following evening, when celebrating the Independence Day of the republic, Tskhinvali was shelled and 10 civilians were injured," he added.
In his words, the republic's leaders pursue only the peaceful resolution of the conflict and are ready to an open dialogue with all democratic forces concerned with peace and stability in the Caucasus.
"The South Ossetian Foreign Ministry hopes that the U.S. Embassy will warn the Georgian authorities against any new provocations and any forms of armed intimidation in the process of the resolution of the Georgian-Ossetian conflict," he noted.
He regards the statements of the Georgian official authorities relating to the Tskhinvali bombardment "not convincing," adding "if Georgia was not involved in the bombardment, this shows that there were some uncontrolled armed formations engaged in terrorist actions." (Black Sea Press/Ria Novosti)

[lightstalker]

The Georgians have well and truely severed ranks with Russia now that Uncle Sam has moved in
.They have told the Russians that they no longer need peace keepers in abkhazia.
Theyve evan named a street in Tblisi after George Bush for fucks sake.(which should aptly be named moron street).
Anyway, the Russians are more worried about Dagestan right now.
If that blows then the shit will really hit the fan.

[Arctic]

Lightstalker wrote:

Anyway, the Russians are more worried about Dagestan right now.
If that blows then the shit will really hit the fan.

I've read that Dagestan is a ticking time bomb... but why will the proverbial poop hit the fan with Dagestan specifically?

[lightstalker]

Well Dagestan is potentially another Chechnya waiting to happen..
incidentally..Putin decided not to "amend" the constitution and stand for election in 2008..
War in Dagestan

Janes Defence Weekely.

Dr Mark Galeotti



Dagestan is not so much a war waiting to happen as several. This republic of 50,000km2 is home to a little under two million people, divided among 33 ethnic groups and 81 different nationalities. This provides ample scope for territorial and ethnic disputes. The Nogai resent the resettlement of Avar refugees from Azerbaijan on their land; Lezgin nationalists dream of a common state with Azeri Lezgins. The Kumyks are resisting the settlement of Laks in their territories, while the Laks and the Chechen-Akkintsy are in dispute over Aukhovsky region (and some Chechens want to see a united Chechen-Dagestani state). Terek Cossacks also continue to assert their right to the region.

The list of potential disputes is long and insoluble. Dagestani President Magomedali Magomedov has sought to co-opt the Dargins and Lezgins, especially by packing the republican security apparatus with them. To a degree he has managed to balance or pacify different ethnic groups, but his is a fragile regime, with minimal support within many of the country's ethnic communities.

Multi-ethnic societies have been known successfully to coalesce, but the engine of integration is generally economic prosperity. Dagestan, by contrast, is arguably the poorest region in the destitute Russian Federation. The economy depends largely on oil and electricity industries badly hit by a lack of adequate investment and the volatility of the region. The unemployment rate in the uplands is around 80%, the high birth rate is fuelling land hunger and the average wage is around US$17 a month.

Dagestan has a history of feud and insurgency. Parts of the country were first annexed by Peter the Great in 1722, but Dagestan means 'land of the mountains'; historically, its uplands have proved to be perfect bandit and guerrilla country. It took another century-and-a-half for the whole country to be brought under Russian rule, and only after the defeat of the legendary warrior hero Islam Shamil. There is a rich folk tradition of banditry and resistance.

The rebels
The insurgents of the 'United Headquarters of Dagestan Mujahideen' proved to be a motley collection of Chechen guerrillas, Dagestani rebels, Islamic extremists and mercenaries from across the Arab world and Central Asia. Notional first-among-equals of their leaders was Shamil Basayev, Chechen rebel leader, erstwhile prime minister and founder of the Congress of Peoples of Chechnya and Dagestan (CPCD). Basayev's position is in many ways an ambiguous one. He is a staunch Muslim but does not share the extreme Wahhabism of many of his allies. However, he does strongly believe that Dagestan and Chechnya should be one state. Although a seasoned and wily guerrilla commander, this war saw him as much as anything else being used as a political figurehead. His CPCD was officially charged with forming new 'structures of Islamic self-government' in rebel-held areas. The brevity of the occupation and the opposition of many locals to their 'liberation' meant this was never a serious process.

The core of the insurgent forces, accounting for perhaps half of the rebel fighters, comprised the band of the guerrilla warlord known as Khottab. A Wahhabi Muslim from Jordan who joined the Chechen rebels in 1994, Khottab is an extremist who believes in the creation of a strict Islamic state in the Caucasus. Having fought against the Russians during the Chechen war of independence, he then went on to wage an open campaign against Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov, whom he regarded as too close to Moscow. Khottab is considered to have been behind several attempts to assassinate Maskhadov, including a car bomb attack in March. Khottab had concluded a marriage of political convenience with Basayev, but in effect retained operational command and a veto on political direction.

The third element in the loose rebel triumvirate were the Dagestanis. The two key figures were Nadir Khachilayev and Siradjin Ramazanov. An ethnic Lat and former leader of the Union of Muslims in Russia, Khachilayev has a long pedigree of opposition to the Magomedov regime. In 1998 he launched an abortive attempt to storm the government buildings in the Dagestani capital, Makhachkala. Khachilayev escaped to Chechnya where he found sanctuary with Islamist guerrilla movements, eventually forging an alliance with Khottab. Despite their Dagestani origins, he and the self-styled prime minister of 'Islamic Dagestan', Ramazanov, proved essentially marginal, reflecting their failure to raise recruits to their side after they had launched their operation. The self-proclaimed Shura (Islamic council) of Dagestan welcomed the 'liberation' and declared an Islamic state, but it proved to have relatively little authority.

Estimates of the insurgent forces' strength have varied from 300 to over 2,000 (a field force of no more than 1,400 seems most credible). While mostly experienced veterans of the Chechen and other wars, they were lightly equipped. They possessed ample supplies of small arms, support weapons, mortars and appropriate ammunition, but they appeared to have only two BTR-60 APCs (quite possibly captured from government forces in the first days of the attack), a single 100mm T-12 anti-tank gun and a few truck-mounted ZU-23 anti-aircraft guns for use as fire support.

The government forces
Despite the initial poor showing of the government forces, Moscow and Makhachala were able to put together a relatively impressive fighting force, including light infantry units (drawn from the Spetsnaz special forces, paratroopers and marines) crucial to mountain and counter-insurgency warfare. Furthermore, while some units were reinforced with extra elements or specially formed by combining smaller elements from a variety of parent units, this was nothing like the wholesale assembly of ad hoc units thrown into Chechnya. In part, this may reflect the decision to promise troops serving in Dagestan the same bonuses as those sent to Kosovo: a monthly payment of around US$1,000, which is up to 200 times a conscript's usual wage. However, it also reflects the fact that the Russian General Staff has learned some of the painful lessons of Chechnya (and remembered some of those from Afghanistan, which it seemed to have forgotten five years ago).

The government forces were made up of three main elements: light and airmobile infantry units able to operate in the mountains and in small ambush and assault forces; larger mechanised units to seal areas off and maintain rear area security; and artillery and air support elements able to interdict supply lines and box the rebels in. Most of the 'teeth' were drawn from regular army units, with the exception of the Interior Ministry's Internal Troops' 102nd Brigade and Rus' commando force and the local Dagestani OMON riot police. Makhachala has long expected an incident of this sort, and since its OMON troops proved so ineffectual in 1996 when Chechen rebels seized hostages in the Dagestani village of Kizlyar, it has put some of its scarce resources into turning this force into, in effect, a small local army. The Dagestani OMON force numbers almost 1,000 men and, bar the absence of armour and artillery, they are equipped as motorised infantry. The force even has a number of BTR-60 and BTR-70 APCs and heavy support weapons.

At the end of 1997 the republic also began raising a volunteer territorial militia. Despite inflated claims of up to 13,000 members, during the emergency its ranks were swelled with reservists and volunteers to around 5,000. Their training and equipment was minimal, making them little more than a home guard force, but their numbers helped secure the government's rear areas and their very presence helped legitimise the government forces, neutralising the charge that this was merely an attempt by Russian 'imperialists' to control the Caucasus (Dagestani OMON or volunteers were often shown on local TV reports, presumably to drive home this message).

Prospects
The rebels clearly made a serious error in thinking that they could 'liberate' Dagestan so easily; they were complacent in their assessment of government forces and unrealistic in their expectations of local support. They surrendered their key advantages -- small-unit operations in the mountains and local support -- to fight the Russians in a more conventional conflict. It thus brought together the rebels into concentrations and situations where the Russians could get to grips with them and inflict heavy losses to their numbers and to their prestige. About half of the rebels seem to have been killed, captured or wounded, or have deserted. Having failed in a direct attack, the rebels may well have chosen to turn to terrorism to further destabilise Dagestan and the rest of the Caucasus (see p2).

The chance of further conflict remains high. The defeat of the rebels averted an imminent war and bought Moscow and Maskhadov a breathing space, but it has done nothing to solve Dagestan's underlying problems. Last month, the rebels struck again, spurred by a week of government attacks on Wahhabi strongholds in Dagestan. This incursion seemed no more likely than the first to dislodge the Russians, but it underlines how the rebels are down but not out.



THE GOVERNMENT FORCES Battalion, 22nd Spetsnaz Brigade (Aksai) 234th Paratroop Battalion, 76th Guards Air Assault Division (Pskov) Reinforced paratroop battalion, 7th Guards Air Assault Division (Novorossiisk) Reinforced paratroop battalion, 31st Air Assault Brigade (Ulyanovsk) Airmobile battalion, 21st Independent Assault-Landing Brigade (Stavropol) Combined marine battalion, 336th Guards Naval Infantry Brigade (Kaliningrad) 205th Motor-Rifle Brigade (Roston-na-Donu) Motor-rifle regiment, 20th Guards Motor-Rifle Division (Volgograd) Artillery regiment, 20th Guards Motor-Rifle Division (Volgograd) 102nd Interior Troops Brigade (Makhachala)* Regiment, Interior Troops Brigade (Nizhny Novgorod)* Rus' anti-terrorist force (Moscow)* Dagestan Republic OMON (Special Designation Police Unit) force (Makhachala)* Elements from OMON and police SOBR (Special Rapid Response Units) from across southern Russia* Dagestani volunteer militia force* 487th Independent Helicopter Regiment (Makhachala?) * Unit operationally subordinated to overall commander Colonel General Kazantsev but not regularly under Defence Ministry command.

Dr Mark Galeotti is Director of the Organised Russian and Eurasian Crime Research Unit at Keele University, UK.

[el3so]

very informative article, lightstalker, muy gracias!
Some sort of publication date would have been nice though.

[lightstalker]

Sorry no date for that article dude..I dont expect it to have been published recently....

However this article was published 3 days ago:

The New Statesman.

Hugh Barnes
Monday 26th September 2005

Chechnya All over again.

Dagestan, with two million inhabitants from 37 ethnic groups, as well as access to oil, has been seen as a sanctuary by terrorists. It's a disaster waiting to happen. By Hugh Barnes

The first thing to say about the Karamakhi Gorge, which Vladimir Putin has compared to "a mini-Iraq on Russia's doorstep", is that it's not really a gorge at all. It is, in fact, a rather unexpectedly fertile valley, about two miles long and half a mile wide, among the barren mountains that separate Dages- tan from the war-torn republic of Chechnya. Nor is there any obvious sign of danger as you enter the village, built in a primitive flat-roofed style on the slopes above the Terek River. Russian military helicopters sweep the sky in non-stop patrol. But the traffic on the ground consists largely of donkeys and horse carts plying the mountainside between isolated farmhouses and muddy fields. To an outsider, Karamakhi certainly doesn't look like the next capital of radical Islam.

Yet the danger is real, according to a veiled threat made by the Chechen rebel commander Shamil Basayev on al-Jazeera television recently, and if Dagestan explodes it will make the war in Chechnya seem like a minor security problem
- which is, ironically, how the Kremlin always seeks to present it. Six years ago, Putin, as prime minister, launched a brutal military crackdown against Muslim separatists in Chechnya. The war won him the presidency, but it has also left tens of thousands of people dead, with no other discernible results. The casus belli was a raid by Chechen fighters into Dagestan, where Arab jihadists had allegedly turned Karamakhi into a fortified base for Islamic militants. ("This territory is under the jurisdiction of sharia law," read a sign by the unmade road, and a green Muslim flag was posted on a hill.) Within a month, Russian troops had driven the hundreds of rebels under Basayev back across the border into Chechnya. Putin announced the capture of Karamakhi in September 1999.

The other day I was sitting in Karamakhi, outside the new beige mosque, watching a funeral procession go by. Friends and relatives of the dead man gathered in the narrow street, beating their brows and wailing, as his body was carried out of a clay brick house and laid on a wagon. One of the guests laid the dead man's gun at his side while the other mourners climbed into an ox-drawn wagon. Half an hour later, the journey to his burial place in the mountains was interrupted by a gang of armed men who fired into the air and shouted threats at the grieving family. The gunmen forced everyone to lie on the ground, took their documents and mobile phones, and began to handcuff them. The gunmen weren't local thugs, though; they were police officers from the Dagestani Anti-Terrorist Centre, who claimed to be investigating a bomb explosion that had killed ten Russian soldiers at a bathhouse in the capital Makhachkala, and the unrelated murder of two policemen.

Terrorism in Dagestan, as elsewhere, is the result of corruption. The only business in the republic, which has just over two million inhabitants belonging to 37 fractious ethnic groups, is the sale of government jobs. The policemen in Karamakhi, in other words, belonged to a family or tribe that could afford to pay for their recruitment. The mourners in the ox-drawn cart belonged to a category of unemployed young people without money or prospects who are often recruited by the Islamic militants and then paid to kill policemen.

The Muslims of Dagestan, for whom Sufism combined with local tradition is the main faith, have generally been anxious to avoid the conflict that has afflicted Chechnya. Since the end of the first post-Soviet decade, however, more radical and militant elements, said to be linked with Wahhabism, have begun to acquire influence. In a way, the aftermath of communism is to blame. In the perception of Islamist radicals, the real Iron Curtain was not the one that separated east from west Europe, but rather the one that cut off Muslims in the Caucasus and central Asia from their co-religionists in the Muslim heartlands. To them, in other words, the fall of the Soviet Union did not mark the end of the cold war so much as the beginning of a potential Muslim reconquista, and to some extent that is what is happening in Dagestan.

The Wahhabi movement has always been viewed with suspicion in the former republics of the Soviet Union. A Sunni group that originated in Saudi Arabia in the 18th century, it has been particularly active in the Muslim regions of the Caucasus, where Wahhabism has earned a reputation for going beyond simply teaching its ultra-orthodox view of Islam. Not only does the group help to construct mosques and bring in Korans printed in local languages, but recent incidents, including the bathhouse attack, suggest the militants have absorbed sophisticated tactics used by jihadists in Iraq and elsewhere. A report issued this month by Igor Dobayev, an expert with the Russian Academy of Sciences, found that as many as 2,000 Islamist insurgents, many belonging to the Qaeda-linked Sharia Jamaat, have carried out a wave of roadside explosions, car bombings, assassinations and mass murders, as well as taking hostages, as happened a year ago in the town of Beslan in North Ossetia.

It was on the anniversary of the Beslan tragedy that I went to Dagestan in search of Basayev, the "mastermind" - if that is the right word - of the horrifying school siege in which more than 300 people, mostly women and children, were killed. One of the unemployed young men I met in Karamakhi agreed to introduce me to a friend who had contacts at the "United Headquarters of Dagestan Mujahedin" (UHDM), a motley collection of Chechen guerrillas, Dagestani rebels, Islamic extremists and mercenaries from across the Arab world and central Asia, but the friend never showed up. Basayev, the leader of the UHDM, is a one-footed staunch Muslim who does not share the extreme Wahhabism of his allies, though he does support the Arab idea that Chechnya and Dagestan should be merged into one Islamic state.



Russian intelligence officials assert that Osama Bin Laden has donated at least $25m and sent numerous fighters to Chechnya and Dagestan with a view to realising this dream. Meanwhile Ayman al-Zawahiri, America's most wanted terror fugitive after Bin Laden, also saw potential in Dagestan as a sanctuary for his Egyptian militant followers before he merged his organisation with al-Qaeda in early 1998. Sergei Ignatchenko of the Russian security service (FSB) believes that al-Zawahiri's plans for the north Caucasus fell apart after the FSB arrested him in Dagestan in 1997, jailed him for six months and then freed him before learning his true identity. Recent attacks in Dagestan have pushed coverage of the Chechen war into the background and revived fears of a new conflict that might be even more terrifying. Dagestan is a bigger place, inhabited by many ethnic groups usually not very friendly to each other. It was Dagestan, not Chechnya, where Russian troops faced most difficulties and suffered worst casualties during the Caucasus war in the 19th century. Its access to the Caspian Sea and its oil and gas reserves also give it a strategic importance that Chechnya does not share.

One morning after his friend's no-show, Dhzerbekov came rushing into the primitive clay-plastered dwelling, or saklya, where I'd slept for the night, and said: "Today I'm going to take you to see Uncle Shamil!" I could hardly believe my luck. Here was the journalistic jackpot of a face-to-face meeting with Basayev - or so I thought, as we drove through a dense forest and pulled up at a makeshift shrine dug into the patches of black earth at the roadside.

Nervously, I looked around for signs of the interviewee, but there was nobody there. With a broad grin, Dhzerbekov pointed at the shrine to the legendary 19th-century warrior Islam Shamil, who fought the Murid wars against Russia for almost a quar-ter of a century until he was undone by the defection, in 1851, of his second-in-command, Hadji Murat, a figure immortalised by Tolstoy. Four years earlier, the hill folk of Dagestan had moved down on to the steppe after tsarist forces had burned their villages to the ground. On the banks of the Terek, they built a new settlement and called it Tulatovo after its founder, Beslan Tulatov. A century later, Tulatovo was renamed Beslan.



In the view of the Russian government, the war in the Caucasus is nothing more or less than a terrorist enterprise paid for by Qaeda money. "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." His analysis recently won the unexpected backing of the village imam in Karamakhi, one of the mourners at the shotgun funeral. "So many Chechens and Arabs have come here that it's impossible to count them," observes Magomed Makhdiyev. "They turn up in carloads, ten or 15 cars at a time, and try to lure our young people away. It starts off very friendly, but sooner or later what you hear is: 'Join us or we'll cut your head off.'"

A secret report by the Kremlin's special envoy to the north Caucasus, Dmitry Kozak, leaked to a Moscow newspaper last month, warned of the emergence of "Islamic sharia enclaves" in the remote villages of the Caucasus mountains. "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, inter-ethnic and religious conflict in Dagestan," Kozak wrote. It seems that his boss has finally got the message. In July, Putin signalled that he was ready for a more hands-on approach to the war on terror in Dagestan by making a whistle-stop tour of the republic, though the visit was not made public until after his departure. The symbolism was clear - and reminiscent of George W Bush's occasional visits to Iraq. When the head of state has to travel unannounced for security reasons, you can bet that the place he's visiting is in trouble.

"The authorities are unable to deal with the situation in Dagestan, and the state is close to panic over it," argues Timur Musayev of the Centre of National Politics, a Moscow-based think-tank. "The inner conflicts in Dagestan have now attained crisis proportions." Shoot-outs, rallies and demonstrations happen every week. So do car bombings and other murderous attacks.

The Kremlin pins the blame on Muslim extremists from outside the region, but some independent experts say the problem is that the republic, governed since 1994 by the loyalist Magomedali Magomedov, is awash in corruption of the typical Russian kind. "In the north Caucasus we can see the total failure of Putin's policies," says Andrei Piontkovsky, director of the independent Centre for Strategic Studies. "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."