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This article appears in the January 10, 2014 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

The Empire Deploys Wahhabi
Terror Against Russia

by Jeffrey Steinberg

[PDF version of this article]

Jan. 6—British imperial forces, through their Saudi terrorist apparatus, launched a new phase of warfare against Russia at the end of 2013. Over Dec. 29 and 30, two suicide bombings ripped the southern Russian city of Volgograd, killing 17 and wounding 40 in an attack on the main train station, and then killing 14 and wounding 27 in an attack on a trolley-bus the next day.

While the Western media have focused their news coverage on the February 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, the reality is, as Lyndon LaRouche has been warning, that Russia is targeted for major destabilization and provocations that could escalate to global thermonuclear war. Following the second suicide bombing, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the National Anti-Terrorism Committee to intensify counterterrorism operations all over the country.

All told, there were at least 32 serious terrorist attacks inside Russia in 2013. Russian authorities are investigating Wahhabi recruitment and terror training facilities in Dagestan and Abkhazia. In June, Doku Umarov, known as the "Russian bin Laden," posted a video calling for a campaign of terrorism on behalf of the "Caucasus Emirates" which he purports to run. Russian anti-terror police killed a top Umarov deputy, Islam Atiev, in Petrovskoye, Dagestan on Dec. 28.

The entire Caucasus region has been thoroughly penetrated by Saudi-funded jihadist terrorists who have been operating in the region since the fall of the Soviet Union two decades ago. And there are more and more reports of Wahhabi clerics recruiting Russian nationals to the Saudi fundamentalist cause.

The British Hand

While the Saudi role in the expanding campaign of asymmetric warfare against Russia is well-documented, there is an equally significant British hand behind the destabilization and war provocations. For more than a decade, the British have been promoting recruitment to the Chechen separatist cause through mosques in the U.K., facilitating the training of recruits in Afghanistan, and the flow of Chechen jihadist fighters into Syria, who are in turn migrating back to southern Russia after combat experience in the civil war against the Assad government.

In 2000, Moscow had filed a number of diplomatic protests to the British government, over open recruitment of Islamist terrorists at mosques throughout the U.K.

Earlier this year, Saudi Arabia's intelligence chief and 9/11 sponsor Prince Bandar bin Sultan reportedly threatened to unleash Wahhabi terrorism against Russia, in a meeting in Moscow with President Putin, unless Russia agreed to support the overthrow of Syria's President Assad. It was the same Prince Bandar who brokered the original "Al Yamamah" oil-for-arms barter deal that created the largest slush fund for covert terrorist operations ever assembled.

A Dossier of Saudi-Sponsored Jihad

A U.S.- and Japan-based publication, the Modern Tokyo Times, has published one of the most thorough publicly available dossiers on the Chechen and Caucasus terrorists involved in the Syrian conflict.

Entitled "Russia Hit by Terrorist Attacks: Gulf Petrodollars, Syria and Caucasus Islamists," the Jan. 2 article by Ramazan Khalidov and Lee Jay Walker (the MTT's chief reporter) is the latest of more than a dozen MTT articles that track the activities of the Chechen terrorist groups such as the Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar (Army of Emigrants and Helpers) brigade and the Riyad-us-Saliheen Brigade (Sabotage Battalion of Chechen Martyrs). These armies are comprised of Chechens, other North Caucasians, but also increasingly, large numbers of jihadis and neo-Salafi foreign veterans of the rebel war on Syria.

Using quotes from terrorist leader Doku Umarov, the article says that Russia is now targeted by the same Islamist battle-tested networks traveling through the "NATO Turkey ratline" and financed by Gulf Arab petrodollars.

"Vast numbers of jihadists from the Caucasus region are entering Syria via NATO Turkey. Therefore, the knock on effect for the Russian Federation is abundantly obvious," the article says. Umarov is directly quoted warning that his "Riyad-us-Saliheen Brigade is now replenished with the best among the best of the Mujahideen, and if the Russians do not understand that the war will come to their streets, that the war will come to their homes, so it is worse for them."

Umarov is also quoted from July 2013 saying about the Sochi Olympic games, that "We, as the Mujahedeen, must not allow this to happen by any means possible." The "best among the best" refers to the al-Qaeda networks in northern Syria that are the direct recipients of the Gulf petrodollars. In addition, the article names the Chechen and other Caucasian leaders who have become commanders in the al-Qaeda-held areas around Aleppo that are in the hands of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and al-Nusra terrorists.

The article cites published material from the Jamestown Foundation, a conservative think tank in the United States with extensive ties to U.S. military services, various Russian news agencies (including rosbalt.ru and Itar-Tass), and the Times of London, the latter of which reported that there were 10,000 foreign fighters in Syria as of August 2013.

Most importantly, the authors stress, "The collective intrigues of America, France, Georgia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, towards Syria—and their respective policies in the North Caucasus region—should alarm the Russian Federation because the same intrigues are aimed at Moscow." This is "just like Afghanistan in the 1980s," they say, and the policy is unbroken from the time of the overthrow and murder of Libya's Qaddafi in 2011, to the Volgograd attacks.

Backlash Against Anti-Putin Campaign

U.S. Rep. Michael Grimm (R-N.Y.), co-chair of the House Russian Caucus, issued a strong statement on Dec. 30 condemning the two terrorist attacks in Russia in advance of the Winter Olympics in Sochi (see Documentation). He has been echoed by a few others who have called for U.S.-Russian collaboration against a common enemy.

One of the most effective ways to move forward on such a change in policy would be the forcing of President Obama to declassify the 28 suppressed pages of the Congressional Joint Inquiry on the 9/11 attacks, which, informed sources insist, would reveal the crucial Saudi role in those attacks, thus highlighting the fact that the United States and Russia face the same threat: the British-controlled Saudi kingdom.

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