Information That Congress Should Consider Before Making Any Decisions Regarding Immigration

Chechen terrorists Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Left, killed by police, and Dzhokhar, or as he spells his name 'Djohar' Tsarnaev, Right, still on the run, caught on surveillance cameras at the April 15, 2013 Boston Marathon.

 

"On September 1, 2004, a group of Chechen terrorists took hostage and two days later murdered at least 335 schoolchildren and parents in Beslan, a town in the Russian republic of North Ossetia." ('How Chechnya Became a Breeding Ground for Terror' by Lorenzo Vidino. Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2005, Vol. XII, Number 3, Pp. 57-66.)

"Over the last decade, Islamist terrorists have co-opted the Chechen cause as part of a global jihad. Umar Ibn al-Khattab, a Saudi native who became the leader of the foreign mujahideen in Chechnya, said, "This case is not just a Chechen matter but an Islamic matter, like Afghanistan.[4]""

"Al-Qaeda's involvement in Chechnya has grown steadily. Drawn by media reports of the Chechen conflict, Ibn al-Khattab and a few aides joined the jihad in the Caucasus in 1995. The same year saw the death of Muhammad Zaki, an American who traveled to Chechnya for the same reason.[5] With expertise developed in Afghanistan during the 1980s and honed in Tajikistan early the following decade, Ibn al-Khattab made a qualitative contribution to the fight against the Russians. By the summer of 1996, Ibn al-Khattab and his band were involved in the fighting that culminated in the capture of the Chechen capital of Grozny.[6]"

"In 1997, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's deputy, attempted to enter Chechnya but was arrested by Russian police in Dagestan carrying false documents. The Russian police—still unaware of how deep the international Islamist involvement had become—did not recognize him. They sentenced him to six months, which he served in a Dagestani prison.[11] He later argued that the Chechen conflict could become a strategic linchpin for the jihadist movement in his book, Fursan taht Rayat ar-Rasul (Knights under the Prophet's Banner):

The liberation of the Caucasus would constitute a hotbed of jihad (or fundamentalism as the United States describes it) and that region would become the shelter of thousands of Muslim mujahideen from various parts of the Islamic world, particularly Arab parts. This poses a direct threat to the United States, represented by the growing support for the jihadist movement everywhere in the Islamic world. If the Chechens and other Caucasian mujahideen reach the shores of the oil-rich Caspian Sea, the only thing that will separate them from Afghanistan will be the neutral state of Turkmenistan. This will form a mujahid Islamic belt to the south of Russia that will be connected in the east to Pakistan, which is brimming with mujahideen movements in Kashmir. The belt will be linked to the south with Iran and Turkey that are sympathetic to the Muslims of Central Asia. This will break the cordon that is struck around the Muslim Caucasus and allow it to communicate with the Islamic world in general. Furthermore the liberation of the Muslim Caucasus will lead to the fragmentation of the Russian Federation and will help escalate the jihad movements that already exist in the republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, whose governments get Russian backing against those jihadist movements. The fragmentation of the Russian Federation on the rock of the fundamentalist movement and at the hands of the Muslims of the Caucasus and Central Asia will topple a basic ally of the United States in its battle against the Islamic jihadist reawakening.[12]

 

'Like Father Like Son.'

 

"As Islamism supplanted nationalism as the motivating factor of the Chechen cause, hundreds of Muslim youths from the Middle East and Europe flocked to Chechnya. Aukai Collins, a Hawaiian convert to Islam, published an account of fighting in Chechnya.[16] Turkey and Jordan, both home to large ethnic Chechen populations, saw an intense movement of fighters.[17]

Ibn al-Khattab remained the key figure in the spread of international jihad to Chechnya, though. Knowledge of his past is the key to understanding the depth of Al-Qaeda's involvement in Chechnya."

 

"In September 1999, suspected Chechen and Dagestani terrorists blew up apartment buildings in Moscow and in the southern Russian city of Volgodonsk, killing 217 people.[29] While Ibn al-Khattab denied responsibility for the theater attack,[30] an armed Chechen incursion into the neighboring Russian republic of Dagestan proved to be the last straw. Moscow, already agitated by mujahideen attempts to impose Islamic law in several Dagestani villages,[31] interpreted the attack as an invasion of Russian territory.

Russian troops poured into Chechnya, launching the second Chechen war, characterized on one hand by indiscriminate Russian attacks and, on the other hand, by terrorist tactics introduced by the foreign jihadists. For example, while no suicide attack took place in Chechnya before 2000,[32] Chechen suicide bombers have struck repeatedly in more recent years. "Black widows," as female Chechen suicide bombers are called, attacked a Moscow rock concert in July 2003,[33] a Moscow subway station the following month,[34] and downed two Russian civilian airliners in September 2004.[35]"

In April 2003, Colonel Ilya Shabalkin, a spokesman for Russian forces in Chechnya, estimated Arabs to be about one-fifth of Chechnya's roughly 1,000 active fighters, but they comprise the skilled communications core and provide most of the expertise in mine laying.[40]

"The migration of jihadists was not one-way. Just as Afghan Arabs traveled to the Caucasus, some Chechens made the opposite trek, traveling to Afghanistan. According to one report, in March 1994, Basayev toured terrorist training camps in the Afghan province of Khost, returning to Chechnya two months later. According to the State Department, several hundred Chechens trained in Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, some fighting there in Al-Qaeda's select military 055 Brigade. In October 1999, emissaries of Basayev and Ibn al-Khattab traveled to Kandahar where bin Laden agreed to provide fighters, equipment, and money to conduct terrorism and aid the fight against Russia. Later that year, bin Laden reportedly sent substantial sums of money to Basayev, Ibn al-Khattab, and Chechen commander Arbi Barayev to train gunmen, recruit mercenaries, and buy ammunition.[41]"

 

"The Benevolence International Foundation, a Chicago-based charity, also pumped money to Chechen Islamists. According to a U.S. government affidavit filed in a Chicago court:

In 1995, Madani al-Tayyib (then in the Sudan serving as Al-Qaida's chief financial officer) asked an Al-Qaida member to travel to Chechnya through Baku, Azerbaijan, to join with Al-Qaida in the fighting in Chechnya. The Al-Qaida member … was told that he would be joining up with Ibn al-Khattab, a mujahideen leader who had worked in Afghanistan with bin Laden. At about this time, a website used by Chechen mujahideen indicated that Ibn al-Khattab led the Arab contingent of fighters in Chechnya. BIF [Benevolence International Foundation] had been identified on the Internet website as conduits for financial support to those fighters.[46]

The U.S. prosecutor's filing detailed how, in the mid-1990s, the Benevolence International Foundation opened an office in Chechnya and worked closely with Sheik Fathi, a Jordanian of Chechen descent, who had fought in Afghanistan. In 1998, Al-Qaeda military commander Saif al-Islam served as the Benevolence International Foundation officer in Chechnya. The organization's office in Baku kept close contact with the Al-Qaeda cell in Kenya that bombed the U.S. embassy in Nairobi in August 1998.[47] Until its November 2002 U.S. Treasury designation as a terrorism financier,[48] the foundation lent material support to Chechen mujahideen in the form of cash and military equipment. An internal memo written by a foundation employee reveals that Vice Prime Minister of the Cabinet of Ministers Khasan Khazutev "assured to become an effective conduit to pass on the proposed aid, cash … to the mujahideen."[49]

Front organizations are just one of the means used by terrorists to smuggle cash into Chechnya. Despite their efforts to stop the money coming from abroad, the Russian domestic security agency reports that up to $1 million a month in remittances from Islamists and the Chechen diaspora reaches Chechnya, delivered by couriers who travel through Georgia.[50] Donations are often sent to Chechnya through hawala, a system used in the Middle East to transfer money informally through a network of couriers and acquaintances, and are, therefore, particularly hard to trace.[51]

Breeding Ground for International Terror

With the loss of their Afghan safe haven, Al-Qaeda operatives scattered. With the help of Islamist charities, many traveled to the Pankisi Gorge,[52] a mountainous area in northern Georgia. In December 2003, for example, an Azeri military court convicted the leaders of Revival of Islamic Heritage, a Kuwaiti humanitarian organization, for sending Azeri recruits to the Pankisi Gorge on their way to fight in Chechnya.[53]

According to Georgian officials, in early 2002, some sixty Arab computer, communications, and financial specialists, military trainers, chemists, and bomb-makers settled in the gorge. The group used sophisticated satellite and encrypted communications to support both Ibn al-Khattab's operations in Chechnya and terrorists planning attacks against Western targets. The "Pankisi Arabs" later tried to buy explosives for what Georgian security officials believe was to have been a major attack on U.S. or other Western installations in Russia.[54]

A 2003 plot involving ricin, a virulent and deadly toxin, demonstrated the Islamist co-option of the Chechen nationalist conflict and its transformation into a global jihadist training ground. According to U.S. intelligence sources cited in the Italian indictment, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist alleged to mastermind much of the Iraqi insurgency, dispatched Adnan Muhammad Sadiq (Abu Atiya), a former Al-Qaeda instructor at a Herat, Afghanistan training camp, to Pankisi. In the gorge, Abu Atiya, a Palestinian who had lost a leg during the Chechen war, trained terrorists in the use of toxic gases.[55] He also was behind a 2002 scheme to stage biological and chemical attacks against Russian or American interests in Turkey.[56]

Undeterred by his compromised Turkey plot, in autumn 2002, he tasked a number of Islamist cells from North Africa to travel to Europe to conduct poison and explosive attacks.[57] In December 2002, French authorities arrested four terrorists planning to blow up the Russian embassy in Paris. According to the French Interior Ministry, three of the individuals arrested—Merouane Benahmed, Menad Benchellali, and Noureddine Merabet—had fought alongside Chechen mujahideen and had received training in toxic substances from "high-ranking Al-Qaeda operatives" in the Pankisi camps. The terrorists said they wanted to attack the Russian embassy to avenge Ibn al-Khattab's death.[58]

Information extracted from the detainees in France led investigators to another cell in north London, which possessed a stock of ricin.[59] The ensuing investigation led to raids on London's Finsbury Park mosque,[60] a raid in Manchester during which an Algerian terrorist fatally stabbed a British police officer,[61] and arrests in Spain.[62]

The global reach of Al-Qaeda's Chechen cells was demonstrated by the fact that the ricin's manufacture was consistent with descriptions in Al-Qaeda manuals and in a notebook found by Russian Special Forces during a raid of a Chechen rebel base.[63] According to the Kremlin's spokesman for Chechen issues, Sergei Yastrzhembsky, the ricin investigation showed that Chechnya had become part of a "network of international terrorist organizations."[64]"

 

"Lorenzo Vidino is deputy director at the Investigative Project, a Washington D.C.-based counterterrorism research institute.

[4] Life and Times of Ibn ul Khattab, a documentary released by Ansaar News Agency, London, 2002, containing footage of Khattab between 1992 and 2002.
[5] U.S. News & World Report, June 10, 2002.
[6] Paul J. Murphy, The Wolves of Islam. Russia and the Faces of Chechen Terrorism (Washington: Brassey's Inc., 2004), p. 37.
[11] Lawrence Wright, "The Man behind bin Laden," The New Yorker, Sept. 16, 2002.
[12] Ayman al-Zawahiri, Knights under the Prophet's Banner, excerpts in Asharq al-Awsat (London), Dec. 2, 2001, in Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Daily Report, Near East South Asia, Jan. 10, 2002.
[13] Matthew Evangelista, The Chechen Wars. Will Russia Go the Way of the Soviet Union?(Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 2002), pp. 71-3.
[14] Federalnaya Slozhba Biezopasnosty Rossiyy Raspologayet Dostoviernoy Informatziey o Putiakh y Sposobakh Finansovoy Podderszhky Voruzhiennikh Formirovanyy Miezhdunarodnikh Terroristov, Voyuyushikh na Territoryy Chechenskoy Respubliky, report by the Russian Federal Security Service (hereafter, FSB report), n.d., p. 36.
[15] Evangelista, The Chechen Wars, p. 73.
[16] Aukai Collins, My Jihad: One American's Journey through the World of Usama bin Laden—as a Covert Operative for the American Government (New York: Pocket Books, 2002).
[17] Author's interview with a former Russian official, Toronto, Apr. 2004.
[29] "Eurasia Overview—Russia," Patterns of Global Terrorism, 1999, Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, U.S. Department of State, accessed Apr. 12, 2005.
[30] "Interview with Emir Khatab: 'Russians Lie out of Panic,'" Kavkaz Center, Grozny, Aug. 31, 2000.
[31] Associated Press, Aug. 30, 1999.
[32] John Reuter, "Chechnya's Suicide Bombers: Desperate, Devout, or Deceived," The American Committee for Peace in Chechnya, Sept. 16, 2004.
[33] CNN.com, July 5, 2003.
[34] Ibid., Aug. 31, 2004.
[35] Ibid., Sept. 3, 2004.
[40] Ibid., Apr. 26, 2003.
[46] "Government Evidentiary Proffer Supporting the Admissibility of Co-conspirator Statements," United States of America v. Enaam M. Arnout, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, 02-CR-892 (N. D. Ill. filed Jan. 6, 2003), p. 26.
[47] Ibid., pp. 77-8.
[48] U.S. Treasury Department, news release, Nov. 19, 2002.
[49] "Government Evidentiary Proffer," p. 79.
[50] The Washington Post, Apr. 26, 2003.
[51] Author's interview with a former Russian official, Toronto, Apr. 2004.
[52] "Ordinanza di Applicazione della Misura della Custodia Cautelare in Carcere," tribunal of Milan, Italy, Nov. 25, 2003, pp. 24-5.
[53] The Associated Press, Dec. 11, 2003.
[54] Time Magazine, Oct. 19, 2002.
[55] "Ordinanza di Applicazione della Misura della Custodia Cautelare in Carcere," pp. 32-3;Time Magazine, Jan. 20, 2003.
[56] "Ordinanza di Applicazione della Misura della Custodia Cautelare in Carcere," pp. 32-3; Anatolia News Agency, July 10, 2002.
[57] Secretary of State Colin Powell, remarks to the U.N. Security Council, New York, Feb. 5, 2003.
[58] Nicolas Sarkozy, French interior minister, statement, Dec. 27, 2002.
[59] The Evening Standard, Jan. 21, 2003; BBC News, Jan. 7, 2003.
[60] Agence France-Presse, Jan. 21, 2003.
[61] CNN.news, Jan. 15, 2003.
[62] Agence France-Press, Sept. 12, 2003.
[63] Los Angeles Times, Jan. 18, 2003.
[64] Financial Times, Dec. 21, 2002." 

('How Chechnya Became a Breeding Ground for Terror' by Lorenzo Vidino. Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2005, Vol. XII, Number 3, Pp. 57-66.)