Russia’s Playing a Double Game With Islamic Terror

2015/8/25 0:33:29

Satter’s Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State deals at length with the September 1999 apartment bombings in Moscow, Buinaksk, in Dagestan, and Volgodonsk, in Rostov, which collectively killed 300 Russian civilians and wounded hundreds more. Today, a bevy of credible observers, both within and without Russia, believe that these operations were actually orchestrated by the FSB and blamed on Chechen jihadists as a pretext for launching the retaliatory invasion which, in the event, got underway three weeks later. “They also served to propel a little-known retired lieutenant colonel in the secret police, who had been appointed by President Yeltsin to the post of acting prime minister a month previously, into the Russian presidency…”

 


By Michael Weiss for the Daily Beast, Aug 23, 2015:

 

Even as America touts its counterterrorism partnerships with Russia, evidence points to the FSB directly feeding Daghestanis to ISIS.

 

It is an article of faith among the many critics of the current Russian government that, however unpleasant Vladimir Putin may be, he is still a necessary partner in one crucial field of U.S. foreign policy: cooperation in the war on Islamic terrorism.

 

Proof, if it were needed, for how valued this cooperation is among U.S. policymakers came in the conspicuous absence of Alexander Bortnikov, the director of the Federal Security Service (FSB), Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, from sanctions levied by the Treasury Department against Russian officials. The sanctions targeted bureaucrats involved in both the invasion and occupation of Crimea and the unacknowledged maskirovka war that Moscow is still waging in eastern Ukraine—a war that has drawn amply on the resources of the FSB and has included several “former” FSB officers on the battlefield. Not only was Bortnikov not sanctioned, he was invited by the White House last February as a guest to President Obama’s three-day conference on “countering violent extremism,” whereas the current FBI director, James Comey, was not.

 

That conference was held principally because of the international threat posed by ISIS and the coalition war against it in Syria and Iraq, not to mention the Chechen identity of the Tsarnaev brothers, perpetrators of the 2013 Boston marathon bombings.

Bortnikov’s presence was a mutual recognition by the U.S. and Russia that fighting jihadism is a shared challenge between two countries now embroiled in a pitched stand-off over the fate of Europe and much else.

 

For complete text, link below:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles ... -with-islamic-terror.html

 

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