SitRep…
Five Al-Qaida Suspects Held in Turkey
22/10/10 - Source SOF
Turkish press reports said Friday that police detained five men suspected of providing support to al-Qaida militants in Afghanistan.
The five, most of them university students, were being questioned after being taken into custody during raids in several Turkish cities this week.
They are being investigated for sending money to support al-Qaida fighters and developing computer programs to jam NATO aircraft targeting al-Qaida in Afghanistan.
Turkey has been alert to al-Qaida since homegrown Islamic militants tied to al-Qaida carried out suicide bombings in Istanbul in 2003, killing 58 people.
In July, Turkish police detained 29 people suspected of links to al-Qaida, and in January, police rounded up 120 people supporting al-Qaida.
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Gunmen Attack Chechen Parliament; 6 Reported Dead
19/10/10 - Source SOF
Hours before Russia’s top policeman, Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliev, was to visit Chechnya’s parliament, a carload of Chechen gunmen tailgated a parliamentarian’s car into the tightly guarded government compound. Shouting “Allahu Akbar!” – or “God is great!” – they ran through the building, shooting policemen, seeking hostages, and setting off bombs.
Doug Bernard talks with VOA Moscow correspondent James Brooke
After a half hour gun battle, three people inside the Parliament had been killed and three militants were dead. All day, Russian television showed images from the scene: a severed leg, windows blown out of the parliament building, and distraught women in head scarves climbing into an armored personnel carrier. The interior minister, who may have been a target, said that the attack was an exception.
Despite reassuring words from the uniformed police general, the other video images from Grozny were graphic reminders to Russians that there is a slow burning civil war in the nation’s southernmost, majority Muslim republics.
In Ingushetia, the republic immediately to the west of Chechnya, attacks have killed over 400 policemen and over 3,000 civilians in the last five years.
In Dagestan, the republic immediately to the east of Chechnya, Interior Minister Nurgaliev said Monday that there have been 174 attacks on policemen this year, killing 89 and wounding 264.
To many, Chechnya seemed to be suffering from war fatigue, after two bloody wars with Russian troops in the 1990s. Ramzan Kadyrov, the republic’s 34-year-old president, has kept violence at bay with a mix of repression, nationalism, Islam and money from Moscow.
Alexey Malashenko, a Moscow-based analyst for Carnegie Center, said that Tuesday’s attack followed an assassination attempt on the Chechen leader in May and a bloody attack on his native village in August.
“It’s not linked to Islam. It’s directed against Ramzan Kadyrov personally. To show to everybody that the opposition, national opposition, is able to do anything they want, even in the heart of Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. So they are strong. And from that point of view, the politics of stabilization of Ramzan Kadyrov failed,” said Malashenko.
One week ago, Chechen’s leader addressed hundreds of delegates to a world Chechen Congress in Grozny, saying that he had restored peace to the republic. Appealing for unity, he said: “Today, we are masters in our own republic. We have full freedom, and all opportunities for observing the canons of Islam. We can freely shout to the entire world that we are Muslims and Chechens. What more do we want?”
To defuse separatism, Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov has created a republic with virtually all the trappings of an independent state. While he calls himself “Father of the Nation,” he does not dwell on the fact that Russian aid to Chechnya last year was $2 billion – equal to 90 percent of the small republic’s budget.
Malashenko of Carnegie, said that Chechnya’s leader knows full well that he is heavily dependent on this money from Moscow.
“Ramzan Kadyrov and the entire Chechnya elite feel very comfortable inside the Russian republic. They get money from the Russian federal budget. That is the main reason, the main reason, and they don’t need political independence,” said Malashenko.
Much of this money has gone into building new mosques, part of an effort to create a virtually Islamic state in Chechnya. Kadyrov has tightly restricted sales of alcohol, allowed polygamy, mandated Islamic studies and attire in all schools, and has all but imposed sharia law. In face of this Islamization, the ethnic Russian population here and in Ingushetia has plummeted – from 30 percent 30 years ago to 3 percent today.
Largely deprived of the banners of Islam and nationalism, Chechnya’s revolt continues. The fuel appears to be: blood feuds among clans; desire for revenge against Kadyrov’s heavy handed security forces; and, desire for a cut of aid from Moscow in a region with Russia’s highest level of unemployment.
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Piracy Hijackings on the Rise
18/10/10 - Source SOF
Captain Pottengal Mukundan is director of the International Maritime Bureau, or IMB, said, “I don’t think we can take any comfort from these attacks. We have seen a new area emerge in the South China seas. In Somalia we have seen the attacks come down but the number of hijackings remain high and will, if the trend continues, be at the same levels, if not more, than it was last year.”
The South China Sea suffered 30 piracy attacks between January and September of this year – that’s triple the number during the same period last year. According to the IMB report, there were 289 piracy attacks in total during those nine months.
The report says Somali pirates are responsible for more than 40 percent of them.
Attacks in the Gulf of Aden, however, have gone down. Only 44 attacks have been reported this year, compared to 100 for the same period last year.
Mukundan said that doesn’t mean Somali pirates have abated their attacks. “The pirates are ranging even further away than they did before into areas where they were not known to be previously operating.”
Mukundan said because the pirates are traveling further afield, vessels are not always on high alert and navy patrols are not able to police such broad expanses. He said international navies that patrol the Gulf of Aden and the Somali basin are crucial in the battle against piracy.
Peter Lehr is a piracy and terrorism specialist at Britain’s University of St Andrews. He said another shift in the nature of piracy is that hostages are now often held for longer than they were previously. He said he worries the situation for hostages may get worse.
“Pirates might start to threaten the lives of hostages just to speed up negotiations and get what they want,” said Lehr. “Maybe that’s something we can see in the future – that this piracy business will be far more deadly than it was before.”
According to the report, during the past nine months guns were used in 137 incidents and knives in 66. One crew member was killed, 27 were injured, and almost 800 hostages were taken.
Somali pirates said their attacks are a defense against toxic dumping and foreign fishing trawlers, which deplete local fish stock and threaten traditional coastal fishing.
