Holy man, you're an FSB Spy. No no, YOU are an FSB spy

(((Siloviki spies versus Caucasus mujihadeen in a GWOT battle here, and hey, it looks like the Russian spies have been landing the harder punches lately.)))

November 1, 2007 (RFE/RL) – In the two years since the raids on police and security facilities in Nalchik, the capital of the Kabardino-Balkaria Republic, the North Caucasus resistance has not launched a single major attack that has made world headlines.

At least seven prominent resistance commanders have been killed since June 2006, including Abdul-Khalim Sadullayev, Aslan Maskhadov's successor as president of the Chechen Republic Ichkeria (ChRI), and radical field commander Shamil Basayev.

Russian and pro-Moscow Chechen politicians claim that those losses have broken the back of the resistance and reduced its total strength to a few hundred men who will be killed or apprehended within months. Resistance websites, however, paint a very different picture, chronicling almost daily strikes against Russian military and security personnel and alleging a continued steady influx of recruits to swell the resistance ranks.

(((The great thing about poisoning and ambushing these battle-tested terrorist veterans is that you can paint the new guys as double-agents.
Make 'em denounce EACH OTHER. So most of the fighting is now locals versus locals rather than freedom-fighters versus the imperial center.
And if one claws his way out of the heap – poison him!)))

Link: Russia: Is North Caucasus Resistance Still Serious Threat? - RADIO FREE EUROPE / RADIO LIBERTY.

in an October 22 statement, London-based ChRI Foreign Minister Akhmed Zakayev claimed to have information suggesting that the Russian authorities had suborned unnamed Chechens to persuade Umarov to proclaim himself amir of a North Caucasus emirate and to declare war on the entire world in the name of the region's Muslims.

Zakayev suggested that the rationale behind those plans was to provide the Kremlin with a cast-iron pretext to deploy more forces to the North Caucasus under the pretext of fighting Al-Qaeda in order to deal the death blow to the independent ChRI and to continue its "genocide" of the region's peoples, "who are ever more actively defending their national and religious rights."

To that extent, Zakayev continued, Umarov's proclamation of a North Caucasus emirate would serve the same purpose as did the declaration in August 1999 of an independent Islamic state in Daghestan in triggering a new war in Chechnya. Zakayev further claimed that Moscow has allocated $500 million to implement "Operation Emirate," and that Russian intelligence operatives have met in an unnamed third country with Chechen representatives to secure their cooperation.

Zakayev did initially not name those Chechens he implicitly accused of collaborating with Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), but Alla Dudayeva, the widow of the late Chechen President Jokhar Dudayev, subsequently identified Udugov as the ideologue of the planned North Caucasus emirate and challenged him either to confirm or refute reports that Umarov has, or was about to, proclaim himself its leader.

In early 2006, Udugov and Zakayev engaged in a heated polemic in which Zakayev argued for the creation of an independent Chechen state and Udugov for an Islamic state encompassing the entire North Caucasus. On October 27, chechenpress.info posted what it claimed is Udugov's draft concept, dated February 2007, for the creation of an Islamic state. On October 30, Zakayev told RFE/RL's North Caucasus Service that Udugov was indeed the author, and that it was Isa Umarov who talked Doku Umarov into endorsing it.

If Zakayev's allegations that the FSB is behind Umarov's decision are indeed true, that would imply that Moscow does still view the North Caucasus resistance as a serious threat, whether military or ideological, and has hit upon a diabolical scheme to destroy it without incurring any criticism from the international community. (((Like anybody's gonna moan about this endless sideshow when they're staring in woe at Iraq and Iran.)))

But in that case it seems strange that the FSB has not yet publicly seized upon Umarov's statement to bolster its claims of operational links between the North Caucasus resistance and Al-Qaeda.

Certainly the possibility that the FSB may have infiltrated the North Caucasus resistance cannot be rejected out of hand. Some analysts believe that the ill-fated incursion by Basayev into Daghestan in August 1999 that served as the rationale for Moscow's second onslaught on Chechnya was masterminded through "cut-outs" by the FSB.

And that it is possible to infiltrate the resistance ranks for nefarious purposes has been demonstrated by the deaths by poisoning of field commanders Khattab in 2002 and Sultan Khadisov in September 2006.... (((That poison stuff is better than waterboarding! Wow!)))

(((Not that the region lacks for stiff interrogation methods: "the little elephant,"
the "swallow," the "phone call to Putin"...)))

http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2007/10/2b0c6a68-453a-4af9-8586-8bc997c3ab81.html
http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2007/10/2b0c6a68-453a-4af9-8586-8bc997c3ab81.html