Category Archives: Russia
31 dead, 130 hurt in suicide bomb at Moscow’s busiest airport
Haaretz
At least 31 people were killed and 130 wounded Monday in a suicide blast at Russia’s busiest airport, Domodedovo, Russian Health Ministry officials said.
Smoke wafted out of the baggage claim area and people were seen running out of the emergency exits at the airport, local media reported.
Domodedovo Airport in Moscow Photo by: AFP
The Russkaya Sluzhba Novostei radio station cited a traveler, identified as
Viktor, as saying he heard the bang outside the airport, where he was waiting for a car.
“There was an explosion, a bang. Then I saw a policeman covered in fragments of flesh and all bloody. He was shouting ‘I’ve survived! I’ve survived!'”
Domodedovo is generally regarded as Moscow’s most up-to-date airport, but its security procedures have been called into question.
In 2004, two suicide bombers were able to board planes at Domodedovo by buying tickets illegally from airport personnel. The bombers blew themselves up in mid-air, killing all 90 people aboard the two flights.
Russia’s rouble-dominated stock market MICEX fell by nearly 2 percent following the blast, which ripped through the baggage claim area of the airport at around 1330 GMT.
Video below:
The spread of Muslim tactics and establishing primacy
We know that in France in over 40 cities, Muslims take over whole streets and sometimes multiple streets for ‘prayer’ and usually for several hours, reportedly not allowing people access to their own homes and businesses. In the comments to the videos I have posted at youtube on this, I frequently get a lot of people, rightfully outraged, but also puffing their chests and insisting this could never happen in their home country/city. Here is a few clips from Moscow and Washington DC. But this takes place wherever Muslims wish to establish their primacy in a location. They of course have a language they use for the press using the typical set of logical fallacies which I attempt to address in this short video, but the real reason is military.
Massive riots in Moscow between Russians and Muslims
Interesting how the AP decided to call the non-Muslim side of the issue, “racists and xenophobes”. Bastards.
From APNEWS:
Dec 16, 7:14 AM (ET)
MOSCOW (AP) – Violent rampages outside the Kremlin have highlighted the need to strengthen public order and raise police prestige, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Thursday, using the occasion to lash out at liberal critics.
Putin spoke after a weekend rally of 5,000 racists and hooligans in Moscow left more than 30 people injured and raised doubts about the government’s ability to stem a rising tide of xenophobia. Police on Wednesday, however, prevented a replay of the violence between nationalists and mostly Muslim ethnic minorities in the capital and several other cities, detaining hundreds.
For the rest, click the APNEWS link above
Makes you wonder. When Gandhi’s people protested and defied the British who came into India and basically took over, were they “racists, hooligans and xenophobes” or nationalists trying to get domestic rule of their nation and culture back.
From the Moscow Riots Dec 16
Iran Placing Medium-Range Missiles in Venezuela; Can Reach the U.S.
From The Hudson Institute:
by Anna Mahjar-Barducci
December 8, 2010 at 5:00 am
http://www.hudson-ny.org/1714/iran-missiles-in-venezuela
Iran is planning to place medium-range missiles on Venezuelan soil, based on western information sources[1], according to an article in the German daily, Die Welt, of November 25, 2010. According to the article, an agreement between the two countries was signed during the last visit o Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to Tehran on October19, 2010. The previously undisclosed contract provides for the establishment of a jointly operated military base in Venezuela, and the joint development of ground-to-ground missiles.
At a moment when NATO members found an agreement, in the recent Lisbon summit (19-20 November 2010), to develop a Missile Defence capability to protect NATO’s populations and territories in Europe against ballistic missile attacks from the East (namely, Iran), Iran’s counter-move consists in establishing a strategic base in the South American continent – in the United States’s soft underbelly.
According to Die Welt, Venezuela has agreed to allow Iran to establish a military base manned by Iranian missile officers, soldiers of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Venezuelan missile officers. In addition, Iran has given permission for the missiles to be used in case of an “emergency”. In return, the agreement states that Venezuela can use these facilities for “national needs” – radically increasing the threat to neighbors like Colombia. The German daily claims that according to the agreement, Iranian Shahab 3 (range 1300-1500 km), Scud-B (285-330 km) and Scud-C (300, 500 and 700 km) will be deployed in the proposed base. It says that Iran also pledged to help Venezuela in rocket technology expertise, including intensive training of officers
Venezuela has also become the country through which Iran intends to bypass UN sanctions. Following a new round of UN sanctions against the Islamic Republic, for example, Russia decided not to sell five battalions of S-300PMU-1 air defence systems to Iran. These weapons, along with a number of other weapons, were part of a deal, signed in 2007, worth $800 million. Now that these weapons cannot be delivered to Iran, Russia is looking for new customers; according to the Russian press agency Novosti[2], it found one: Venezuela.
For the rest please click through to Hudson using the link at the top of the page:
Oct 19 2010 Muslims attack in 2 nations
Muslims detonated explosives and shot random people at a parliament in Chechnya, as well as are running gun battles in the streets of Yemen.
More on Yemen is here from AFP:
ADEN, Yemen — Yemeni troops are fighting a guerrilla war against Al-Qaeda in southern towns in which they are struggling to come to terms with the hit-and-run tactics of the enemy, a commander said on Tuesday.
“We are engaged in what amounts to a guerrilla war with Al-Qaeda in the streets and neighbourhoods,” the deputy head of security in the Abyan province town of Mudia, Colonel Mohammed al-Khodr, told AFP.
“So far we have not managed to win the battle and are facing difficulties as most of the fighters are drawn from among the towns’ residents,” Khodr said. Continue Reading →
Terror in Russia. Islam in action
9-01 Remembering Beslan
Sharia in Chechnya: women attacked for not wearing head scarves
From The Province, courtesy TROP
Women targeted in Chechnya
Reuters August 22, 2010
Many women in Russia’s volatile Chechnya region said on Friday they had been harassed and some physically harmed by bands of men for not wearing head scarves during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.
Against the backdrop of a spreading Islamist insurgency, many fear that growing interest in radical Islam could fuel separatism in the volatile North Caucasus, where the Kremlin watches uneasily as sharia law eclipses Russian.
Residents and witnesses told Reuters that bearded men in traditional Islamic dress have been roaming the streets both on foot and in cars since Ramadan started on Aug. 11, demanding bare-headed women wear a head scarf. Continue Reading →
Israel must attack Iran by Aug 21 2010 -John Bolton
Muslims take credit for Aug 9 Moscow blast
August 12, 2010
Causasus rebels from the Riyadus Salikhiyn Brigade of Martyrs claimed responsibility for the Aug. 9 blast outside the Gazprom central office in Moscow, Kavkaz-Tsentr news agency reported on Aug. 12. Rebels stated that the emir of Muslims of the Caucasus Dokka Abu Umarov gave the orders to show Russia’s leadership and largest business that the war is not over. It comes to homes and offices, the statement read, declaring central Russia as a “zone of counter terrorist operation.” The rebels said they plan to attack Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Islamists Gain Upper Hand in Russian Republic
I do not wish to make light of a mans loss of his son, but the caption on this photo does give one pause…
Nowhere in Russia is the situation so explosive as in the autonomous republic of Dagestan. An ongoing Islamist insurgency has plunged the corruption-plagued region into a state resembling civil war. Here, Magomedshapi Vagabov holds up a picture of his son, who was allegedly killed by police because they considered him an insurgent. "All my son did was to preach pure Islam," says Vagabov. "He wasn't an insurgent."
From SPIEGEL:
Nowhere in Russia is the situation so explosive as in the autonomous republic of Dagestan. An ongoing Islamist insurgency has plunged the corruption-plagued region into near civil war. Some high-ranking Russian officials believe it will take years to defeat the extremists, if it can be done at all.
An old man is trudging home through the narrow, dusty streets of Gubden, carrying a last memento of his murdered son in the pocket of his trousers. The photo of his eldest son, which the man has stored on his mobile phone, shows a gaping hole next to his left eye. “They killed him when he could no longer defend himself,” says the man, whose name is Magomedshapi Vagabov.
Vagabov takes off his grey, sheep’s wool cap. His house lies in the shadow of a mosque that towers like a fortress over Gubden, a village in the mountains of Dagestan, a Russian republic in the Caucasus region. Representatives of the central government in Moscow rarely come to Gubden without the protection of armored vehicles and helicopters. It’s not Russian criminal law but Sharia law that applies in this village of 4,000 inhabitants, many of whom sympathize with the Islamist insurgents who have spent more than a decade trying to establish a theocracy that would extend from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea.
Close to 9 million people live in the autonomous republics of Russia’s northern Caucasus. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, each of these republics, particularly Chechnya, has been plagued by terrorism and war. But nowhere is the situation today as explosive as it is in Dagestan. This desperately poor strip of land on the western shore of the Caspian Sea, which is smaller than the US state of West Virginia, is home to several dozen ethnic groups that are bitterly at odds over government posts and grazing land, while an Islamist insurgency wages a war against Moscow and Dagestan’s Russian-controlled government.
Almost Ungovernable
The resistance against the military campaigns of Czarist troops began in Dagestan more than 150 years ago. Russia needed a force of more than 300,000 to finally subjugate the region after a war than raged for about 30 years. The spirit of resistance continues to shape the republic today. Two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, chaos prevails in Dagestan, primarily because of the activities of radical Islamists. The Caucasus republic has become almost ungovernable.
In less than four years, the world will come together in the region for the 2014 Winter Olympics, which are being held in the city of Sochi. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin insists that this will not be a problem, and yet his Interior Ministry has just reported that the number of terrorist attacks in the northern Caucasus has more than doubled. Only last Wednesday, armed men stormed a hydroelectric power plant in the Kabardino-Balkar Republic, where they detonated three bombs. Sometimes the attacks even hit the Russian capital: In late March, a group of young female suicide bombers from Dagestan blew themselves up in the Moscow subway, killing themselves and 40 others.
In Makhachkala, the Dagestani capital, there are reports of attacks on a daily basis. In the last two weeks alone, a high-ranking judge, a Christian priest, three police officers and mayor were shot to death, policemen were injured when a bomb exploded, and another bomb caused a train to derail.
‘All My Son Did Was to Preach Pure Islam’ Continue Reading →
Russia police arrest Kremlin critic Nemtsov, others
Reuters:
Boris Nemtsov, a leader of the anti-Kremlin, liberal Union of Right Forces (SPS) party, speaks during a news conference in Moscow November 26, 2007.
Credit: Reuters/Sergei Karpukhin
By Ben Judah and Denis Pinchuk
MOSCOW/ST.PETERSBURG | Sat Jul 31, 2010 5:34pm BST
MOSCOW/ST.PETERSBURG (Reuters) – Police arrested anti-Kremlin opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in Moscow and at least 95 others at demonstrations in cities across Russia on Saturday against restrictions on freedom of assembly.
In St. Petersburg, Russia’s second largest city, 60 out of about 200 protesters were arrested. A Reuters reporter said some had bleeding noses and some had their heads beaten against police buses.
In Moscow, along with Nemtsov — a fierce critic of Russia’s ruling elite — the police arrested Left Front opposition leader Sergei Udaltsov and at least 35 others.
Mikhail Schneider, executive secretary of the Solidarity movement, told Reuters the protests were intended to promote democracy.
“We’re here because the government has broken the constitution,” he said. “Pay greater attention because people are lying to you about democracy in Russia.”
Earlier in Vladivostok, no arrests were made in a protest of about 30 people.
(Writing by Lidia Kelly; Editing by Louise Ireland)
Czech spy scandal forces out generals
And this, within a month of major spy rings being expelled from the US. H/T Digwuren
From The Irish Times:
DANIEL McLAUGHLIN
THREE TOP Czech generals have been forced to leave the military after one of their aides was compromised by contact with a Russian spy, amid intelligence agency warnings that Moscow is intensifying efforts to steal Prague’s secrets.
The officers stepped down after serving as the head of president Vaclav Klaus’s military office, the Czech Nato representative in Europe, and as deputy general for the military chief-of-staff, according to leading Czech newspaper Mlada Fronta Dnes .
The generals’ departure was prompted by the discovery last year that a female major who had worked in each of their offices had become close to a state-employed psychologist named as Robert R, who was spying for the Kremlin.
“We have identified and eliminated an attempt by Russian military intelligence to penetrate influential command structures of the military, with the intention of obtaining sensitive information from the upper echelons of the ministry of defence,” the Czech intelligence agency said.
The agency did not reveal whether the unnamed major knew that Robert R was a spy or if she passed him any information. He is now believed to be back in Russia, after causing the biggest espionage scandal in recent Czech history.
The revelation comes on the heels of a cold war-style episode that saw the United States arrest 10 Russian agents living undercover on its territory and “swap” them at Vienna airport for four men who had been jailed by Moscow, three of them for espionage.
In its annual reports of recent years, the Czech counter-intelligence service (BIS) has warned that Russia was stepping up efforts to gather information on the country’s political and military organisations and major companies, particularly in the energy sector.
“An example of this is a group of people who have, for a long time worked for the Russian intelligence service counter to the interests of the Czech Republic and on Czech soil, whom the BIS uncovered and whose operations it thwarted,” the BIS said in its 2009 report.
It is not clear if this referred to people involved in the generals’ case, but Czech media said that seven Russian diplomats were expelled from the country for spying last year.
Czech news magazine Respekt said Russian agents had been uncovered thanks to information from Herman Simm, a former senior Estonian defence ministry official who was arrested for spying for Moscow in 2008.
STRATFOR: Mass Murder in Russia
STRATFOR SITREP:
July 24, 2010
Two people were killed and seven injured in the south Russian city of Samara in Volga Federal District on July 24 around 11:00 a.m. Moscow time when unidentified gunmen began firing on people at an open-air market, RIA Novosti reported. A local police source said as many as 14 people had been injured. Police and emergency services are at work at the scene of the incident and an investigation has been launched.