WOT: Russian Attack

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Registered: 06-17-2004
WOT: Russian Attack
3
Mon, 09-06-2004 - 7:15pm
10 of 32 terrorists at Beslan were Arab nationals with Al Qaida ties



SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

Monday, September 6, 2004


http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/breaking_8.html 



MOSCOW – Russian investigators said Arab operatives linked to Al Qaida played a major role in the takeover of a Russian school in which 400 people were killed.

Russian officials said authorities have determined that 10 of the 32 suicide attackers who took over a high school in Beslan in North Ossetia last week were nationals from several Arab countries. Most of the attackers were Chechens and Ingush who had been trained at Al Qaida camps in Afghanistan.

The 10 Arab nationals came from Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Syria, officials said. They said security forces seized notebooks in Arabic in the school taken over by insurgents. Officials said survivors told authorities that some of the captors spoke Arabic during the three-day hostage ordeal.

All of the captors were said to have been killed, but three accomplices were arrested, Middle East Newsline reported.

The Arab nationals were said to have been recruited in the Middle East and hosted by Shamil Basayev, head of the Chechen insurgency and aligned with Al Qaida.


"We're hoping to release additional information over the next few days," an official said. "But precise details will require cooperation from our allies."


The officials said the attackers were trained in Al Qaida camps in Afghanistan and financed by Abu Omar Al Seif, regarded as a leading Al Qaida operative and the organization's representative in Chechnya.

Al Seif, identified as the chief Islamic ideologue in the Chechen insurgency, was brought to Chechnya in 1995 by Saudi national Samir Saleh Abdullah Al Suwailem, known as Abu Khattab. Abu Khattab was said to have been killed in 2002.

Officials said Basayev received Saudi financial aid for at least a decade, most of it through Al Seif. They said Basayev and Al Seif employed hundreds of Saudi volunteers for suicide and other mass casualty attacks in Chechnya and other parts of Russia as well as raised funds required for the attack on the school in Beslan.

In December 2003, Federal Security Service spokesman Sergei Ignatchenko said virtually all of the suicide attacks in Russia over the last few years were organized by Al Seif and Abu Al Walid. Ignatchenko identified Al Walid as responsible for the Arab fighters in Chechnya.

"Major financial resources reach Al Walid and Abu Omar from extremist centers in a series of Arab countries," Ignatchenko was quoted as saying by the Itar-Tass news agency.

Several Middle East countries planned to increase security cooperation with Russia, officials said. On Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was scheduled to meet Israeli leaders in an effort to pave the way for expanded security cooperation. Saudi Arabia and Turkey have also agreed to increased security cooperation with Moscow. Victims of the insurgency attack included at least one Turkish national.

"The recent terrorist act in Russia has showed the importance of international cooperation in fight against terrorism," Turkish Interior Minister Abdulkadir Aksu said.

Renee ~~~

Renee ~~~

iVillage Member
Registered: 06-17-2004
Mon, 09-06-2004 - 7:34pm
An important consideration:
The Crossroads
http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/2004/09/crossroads-little-public-analysis-has.html

Little public analysis has been devoted to options realistically available to Vladimir Putin in response to the massacre of schoolchildren in Ossetia. The fact is that the world has been spoiled by looking at the world through the prism of the American media. When President Bush stopped to consider his response to September 11, he had a range of options available only to a nation as unimaginably powerful as the United States of America. Japanese newspapers reported that President Bush was offered the nuclear option immediately after the attack, probably as an extreme in a range that included filing a diplomatic protest on the opposite end of the spectrum, which he rejected, choosing instead to do what no other country could do: take down the state sponsors of terrorism and pursue the terrorists to the four corners of the earth. America's unmatched power allowed President Bush to select the most humane course of war available. No European power, nor all of them put together, could have embarked on such a precise campaign for lack of means. It was a rich man's strategy, a guerre de luxe.


But no one who has seen the rags and hodgepodge of equipment issued to the Russian Special Forces can entertain any illusion that Vladimir Putin can go around launching raids with hi-tech helicopters, or follow around perps with robotic drones before firing, or use satellite-guided bombs to wipe out enemy safe houses that have been seeded with RFID chips. Nor will those detained by Russia gain weight the way detainees have done at the "inhuman" Gitmo prison. That's an American way of war which even Europeans can only regard with envy. The poor must respond with less. When the Nepalese saw the video of their 12 compatriots executed by terrorists in Iraq, they did what you could do with a box of matches: they burned the mosque in Kathmandu. To paraphrase Crosby, Stills and Nash, 'if you can't hit the one you should then hit the one you're with'.


While Russia can do better than a box of matches, the reality is that its poverty and low-tech force structure will make any response that Putin may choose a brutal and largely indiscriminate affair unless it is subsumed into the larger American-led Global War on Terror. The real price of the European vacation from history is its abandonment of the first principle of civilization. Unless there is common justice, there will be vigilante justice.

Renee ~~~

Renee ~~~

iVillage Member
Registered: 06-17-2004
Mon, 09-06-2004 - 7:57pm
"MISSING"
CNN is reporting that gravediggers in Beslan have been told to prepare 600 graves today, and to be ready to dig even more in the next few days. Six hundred graves, most of them for little children. In Beslan, parents are posting makeshift "missing" posters around the village, just like New Yorkers did after 9/11. It is breathtaking to see that gesture repeated again, so soon. Is it going to have to happen here before Americans wake up to the true nature of the threat posed by Islamic extremism? I'm afraid so, yes.
Posted at 01:00 PM

Renee ~~~

iVillage Member
Registered: 06-17-2004
Mon, 09-06-2004 - 8:17pm

Some militants

Renee ~~~