The Forgotten Jihads

Something that always manages to perplex me when I think about it, is the attention given to certain conflicts around the world, and the deafening silence about other, far more bloody conflicts. The situation in Palestine, while of course it is tragic, absolutely dominates news headlines around the world, to the point where the conditions of battery hens in Israel get a prominent placing in "the world's leading liberal voice", the Guardian. Iraq and Afghanistan, of course, also capture the attention of the media, not unjustly, given the conflicts there, and the Western involvement in the countries. These headline conflicts, whether they get a proportionate or disproportionate amount of attention from the worlds' media, often overshadow some particularly tragic stories and conflicts. The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s, which lasted nearly 10 years, took the lives of between 1 and 2 million people, and created upwards of 5 million Afghan refugees, garned relatively little attention at the time. The Algerian Civil War during the 1990s, sparked by the military regime cancelling elections after the Islamist party, the Islamic Salvation Front, won the first round of the 1991 elections, cost the lives of an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 Algerians. I forgive most people who have never heard of this conflict. It has all but been forgotten by most people owing to the media's lack of interest in the conflict (though admittedly, this is partly due to the hellish danger for journalists working in Algeria during those terrible years). The India-Pakistan conflict over Kashmir hits the headlines when there is a spectacular terrorist attack such as the 2008 Mumbai attacks, or a military stand-off between the two nuclear-armed adversaries. What we very seldom read of is the brutal insurgency by salafi-inspired Kashmiris and Pakistanis, and the often heavy-handed security clamp-downs by the Indian army in the Himalayan province. Overall, this insurgency has led to the deaths of some 47,000 people.

To make a quick comparison, the First Palestinian Intifada took the lives of around 2,300 people. The Second Palestinian Intifada took the lives of a little over 6,500 people. I don't need to point out the obvious here - the amount of column inches devoted to these uprisings in the Western press, compared to the insurgency in Kashmir, which has taken the lives of far more people, is many, many times more.

Chechnya is another prime example of a forgotten jihad, and reading about it is actually what inspired me to make this post. It's always great to read good articles about conflicts which are so systematically ignored in the Western media.

Tom Parfitt at Foreign Policy has started writing an excellent journal of his travels through Russia's bloody Caucasus region, a conflict which is perenially ignored by the media. Their silence seems to only be punctured every now and again by spectacular attacks such as the attack on Moscow's international airport last month, the attack on the Moscow subway system last year, or tragedies such as the Beslan school siege.

So my hat is off to Tom Parfitt for travelling through an extremely dangerous, but criminally neglected region on the outskirts of Russia.

Part 1: Sword or Samovar

In popular Slavic imagination, this 700-mile belt of country below the snowy peaks is a domain of warriors and bandits, a stereotype that owes at least something to fact. I met a murderer on the run, got arrested on suspicion of being a spy, and saw more Kalashnikovs than you could shake a stick at. Violence felt like it was always just around the corner. But I was lucky; my journey coincided with a relative lull in the guerrilla war that has gripped the region since the end of full-scale fighting in Chechnya in 2001.

I've quickly found out that the war has spread faster and farther than I expected. To start, there was the corpse I saw on one of my first nights here. I was walking back to my hotel in Nalchik, the capital of Kabardino-Balkaria, when I passed an apartment block cordoned off by armed police. In the yard behind it, a detective was leaning over and shining a flashlight on a dead body. According to news reports on Sunday, Feb. 13, the victim had been shot half an hour before I passed by; his name was Ilyas Tramov, 42, a father of four who wore the long beard associated with Muslim radicals. His killers, the media suggested, were most likely vigilantes, taking vengeance for real or perceived involvement in the Islamist militia that has ravaged this republic -- once a peaceful backwater.

The brunt of the war, however, is borne some 900 miles south. Here, at home in the Caucasus, the boyeviki -- a loose, multinational coalition of fighting groups called jamaats -- carry out almost daily attacks on policemen, government officials, and even traditional healers, whom they consider pagans. The militants control no permanently held territory, but have proved adept at moving between safe houses and forest hideouts from which they launch guerrilla strikes, bombings, and assassinations.

In turn, Russian security forces have used a brutal mix of kidnapping, torture, and extrajudicial killing in an attempt to subdue the rebels, a tactic that only exacerbates the problem. After the Moscow metro bombings, Umarov said he had ordered the attacks in revenge for Russian commandos murdering a group of innocent young Ingush garlic-pickers in a forest.

Although police and FSB operatives have shown signs of curbing some of their worst excesses, they still act with impunity, persecuting relatives of the fighters as well as conservative Muslims who may have nothing to do with the underground militia.

Overall, the death toll is on the rise. Caucasian Knot, a website that monitors casualties, wrote in a report last month that 754 people were killed in the conflict in 2010, including 178 civilians (the figures exclude victims of attacks outside the region). In Kabardino-Balkaria alone, there was a fivefold increase in terrorist attacks compared with 2009, according to Russia's Interior Ministry.

Part 2: Blood Relations

Human rights groups have cataloged thousands of abuses of civilians by Russian security forces since the wars in Chechnya in the 1990s, when soldiers beat and tortured Chechen men at temporary filtration camps. Often the aim was to force innocent victims to confess the names and whereabouts of relatives among the separatist fighters.

Chechen jihadists demand independence from Russia and a Caucasus Islamic Emirate.

I find it amazing that such a bloody and dreadful conflict receives so few column inches in the western media. Given the massively heightened interest in Wahhabism since 9/11, and the corresponding Islamization of the conflict in the Caucasus, it might have been thought that such a development would have increased interest in the region, but this does not seem to have been the case, even for the most Wahhabi-obsessed of talking heads.

Hopefully this blog will be able to cast some light on some of these forgotten jihads and fill in some of the gaps left by the mainstream media.