Soccer Dad

Remembering beslan

A number of blogs featured posts on the fifth anniversary of the terror attack on the school in Beslan.

What I remember from the time, is an op-ed from the London paper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat (via MEMRI):

"Obviously not all Muslims are terrorists but, regrettably, the majority of the terrorists in the world are Muslims. The kidnappers of the students in Ossetia are Muslims. The kidnappers and killers of the Nepalese workers and cooks are also Muslims. Those who rape and murder in Darfour are Muslims, and their victims are Muslims as well. Those who blew up the residential complexes in Riyadh and Al-Khobar are Muslims. Those who kidnapped the two French journalists are Muslims. The two [women] who blew up the two planes [over Russia] a week ago are Muslims. Bin Laden is a Muslim and Al-Houthi [the head of a terrorist group in Yemen] is a Muslim. The majority of those who carried out suicide operations against buses, schools, houses, and buildings around the world in the last ten years are also Muslims.

"What a terrible record. Does this not say something about us, about our society and our culture? If we put all of these pictures together in one day, we will see that these pictures are difficult, embarrassing, and humiliating for us. However, instead of avoiding them and justifying them it is incumbent upon us first of all to recognize their authenticity rather than to compose eloquent articles and speeches proclaiming our innocence... "

Michael Reynolds, at the Middle East Strategies at Harvard website argues that at a time when there are those arguing for a withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Soviet example suggests that withdrawing now may encourage more terrorism.

After the end of the first Chechen war and Russia's withdrawal from Chechnya in 1996, Khattab teamed up with the most famous of the Chechen warlords, Shamil Basaev. Basaev himself has stated that he had trained in Khost, Afghanistan in the spring of 1994, prior to the beginning of the first Chechen war. Together, Basaev and Khattab established their own camps inside Chechnya where they trained volunteers from throughout Russia's North Caucasus in guerrilla warfare. Their activities, which extended to involvement in hundreds of kidnappings inside Chechnya and neighboring regions, undermined the elected government of Aslan Maskhadov and created hellish conditions for inhabitants in Chechnya and surrounding areas.

Whether by design or accident, Chechnya and its environs were coming to resemble Afghanistan. Residents were being reduced to having to choose between unbridled criminality or a rudimentary order based on a harsh interpretation of sharia. It is worth noting that during this period in 1997 Ayman al-Zawahiri, described often as the mastermind of Al Qaeda, was arrested and detained in Dagestan for five months. Zawahiri was searching for a safe haven, and had been trying to make his way to Chechnya. Upon being released from Dagestan he then made his way to Afghanistan.

The aim of Basaev and Khattab was to drive Russia out of the whole North Caucasus and unite the region in an Islamic state. To assist their cause they recruited Adallo Aliyev, a famous Dagestani poet, as their figurehead leader. (I met with Adallo on several occasions while he was on the lam in Turkey. Adallo was later amnestied by Dagestani authorities due to his age and stature as a cultural icon. He was the subject of a good overview of the turbulent North Caucasus in Der Spiegel this past July.)

While the geography's different, this suggests that an American withdrawal from Afghanistan may well encourage more attacks on American interests abroad.

The reason I linked to this article is because Basaev was the admitted mastermind of the Beslan attack.