IS Chechen commander vows to revenge Russia

PanARMENIAN.Net - When the Islamic State commander known as “Omar the Chechen” called to tell his father they’d routed the Iraqi army and taken the city of Mosul, he added a stark message: Russia would be next, Bloomberg reports.

“He said ‘don’t worry dad, I’ll come home and show the Russians’,” Temur Batirashvili said from his home in Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge, on the border with the Russian region of Chechnya. “I have many thousands following me now and I’ll get more. We’ll have our revenge against Russia.”

As the U.S. and European countries assess the risk of home-grown jihadists returning to stage attacks on their native countries, the turmoil in the Middle East also reverberates in the Caucasus. The region wedged between Russia, Iran and Turkey is an intricate web of tensions that’s erupted into violence in the past three decades in hot spots from Chechnya to NagornoKarabakh and Georgia, Bloomberg notes.

Tarkhan Batirashvili now known as Omar al-Shishani is a leader of the forces fighting for an Islamic caliphate in Syria and Iraq. Among them are dozens of youths from Pankisi who, disaffected by a lack of jobs and angered by Russia’s dominance in the Caucasus, have followed the call to jihad, the report says.

Al-Shishani is the tactical mastermind behind Islamic State’s swift military gains on the ground in Iraq’s Anbar province, west of Baghdad, including an encirclement in which his forces killed as many as 500 Iraqi troops and captured 180 more near Fallujah, according to Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, senior fellow at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

The force includes about 1,000 Russian-speaking jihadists, or about half of the fighters from outside Syria and Iraq, according to Elena Suponina, a Middle East expert and adviser to the director of Moscow’s Institute for Strategic Studies. Most of them are Chechens, with many from Pankisi, a jagged gash eight kilometers (5 miles) long and two kilometers wide tucked in Georgia’s remote mountains between Chechnya and South Ossetia. It’s home to about 11,000 Georgians, Chechens and Kists, a subgroup of the nation.