Did Osama bin Laden order beheading of three Britons?

These 4 were beheaded by Islamic Militants, it was before 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, the election of George Bush etc, so it is very hard for the lefties, apologists etc to explain.

Consequently, whenever debating against them I freqently use this example as a citation of the fact Islamic nutters were beheading Infidels prior to 9/11.

Six years prior to that event, two Brits were also beheaded and mutilated by Islamic Mujahideen in Bosnia. Ted Skinner and Arlow McBride volunteered to train the Bosnian Army in the conflict there in the 1990s. However, Islamic Mujahideen, who were mercinaries also on the side of the Bosnian Army, took exception to the presence of Infidels and so beheaded them (all this is outlined in Bob Stuart's (British UN Commander in Bosnia) Memoirs "Broken Lives").

These 4 were beheaded by Islamic Militants, it was before 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, the election of George Bush etc, so it is very hard for the lefties, apologists etc to explain.posted by tranmere_rover

It's my experience, from internet arguments, that it is non Muslim right wingers who apologize, rationalize and defend Islam,more than leftists.

Such as Presbyterians and ultra conservative, albeit antiJewish, Christians.

I've been arguing for two years with people whom can only be called rightists or conservatives, as they are patriarchial, homophobic, anti abortion, anti "feminist" and misogynistic, and they also defend Islam because Islam is also homophobic, anti abortion, anti feminist and patriarchial.

People like you are part of the problem, as you split the world into a narrowly defined us v them, and then take a sledgehammer to pound square pegs into round holes, based on your absolutist and ignorant perceptions.

The right has more in common with the Muslims than the left, as the right comes from the same place - ultra conservativism, misogynistic, homophobic, patriarchial family values.

(all this is outlined in Bob Stuart's (British UN Commander in Bosnia) Memoirs "Broken Lives").
Hi Tranmere Rover
This incident rang bells but was not immediately familiar. So I did a google and found the book is still in print, available through Amazon as "Broken Lives: Personal View of the Bosnian Conflict - Lt Colonel Bob Stewart "

Without prying into personal details about which discretion is advisable, I have formed the belief that these men would have been local?

It is possible to put round pegs into square holes with out brute force.Just by looking from a different angle before solving the problem.
Example,take a rod and view it sideways,you will then have either a square or oblong,depending on the length of the rod,get the idea!!!!
So is the rod round or square?
Left/right/right/left what the fook!!!both sides have made mistakes in this war on terror.On this site our main concern is exposing Islam,not trying to prove left is better than right and vice versa
So all you bickering little lefty,s/right,s pour yourself,s a scotch or a nice wine and lets get back to the JIHAD

A Ticking Time-Bomb
Vassiliki Kefalas
This is a detailed analysis of Russia’s Chechnya problem by a well-informed analyst in the light of the hostage crisis that rocked Moscow last October. It was received sometime back this year but could not be used earlier due to space constraints. In view of the topicality of Chechen terrorism this article is now being published here in two parts for the benefit of our readers who will find the contents highly valuable from the Indian standpoint. —Editor
Brazenly attacking Moscow’s Theatre Centre on Dubrovka, just five kilometres from the Kremlin, and holding some 800 people in the audience captive (October 23-26, 2002), a 50-member kamikaze squad of Chechen terrorists brought the war from a tiny border province 1600 kilometres away in the northern Caucasus to the Russian capital itself. Led by 27-year-old Movsar Barayev, nephew of the field commander Arbi Barayev1 who was reportedly killed last year, the Chechens arrived in jeep-like vehicles at the former Soviet-era House of Culture of the State Ball-Bearing Factory in a working-class neighbourhood on Melnikova Street, interrupting Act 2 of “Nord Ost”, the 323rd performance of one of Moscow’s most popular musicals, as it was about to begin shortly after 9 pm. The masked guerrillas in camouflage battledress, wielding automatic weapons and with explosives strapped around their waists, included 18 women shrouded in black except for their eyes. Video-taped demands of the hostage-takers, delivered earlier to the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television network, stipulated that Russia pull out its troops from the breakaway republic of Chechnya within a week, the price for non-compliance being set at blowing up the building and taking hundreds of human lives. Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev,2 the most prominent Chechen resistance field commander, claimed responsibility for the Moscow attack staged by members of the rebel group Riyadus-Salikhin (“Gardens of the Righteous”), the Reconaissance and Sabotage Battalion that he heads; Basayev also warned of further attacks on Russian cities.3
During the 56-hour ordeal of the hostages, much of it carried live on Russian television, more questions were being raised about the conflict in Chechnya—Russia’s bloodiest and potentially most dangerous internal crisis—than could be easily answered, both by the Muscovites themselves as well as the international community. Official estimates of the last three years put the Russian casualties at over 4405 servicemen killed and 12,530 wounded.
The Russian Government maintains Chechnya is an undisputed historical part of its own territory. Much has been written in Russia and outside on the “Chechen issue”. Since it began in late 1994, however, the armed conflict in Chechnya has claimed tens of thousands of lives and rendered hundreds of thousands homeless. The Moscow hostage crisis has served to focus on Chechnya’s terrorist network, which enabled such a daring act to be planned and executed so near the Kremlin. President Putin’s decision to crush the rebels in October 1999 and gain nominal control of Chechnya came after several bomb attacks on apartment buildings in Russian cities. Today, in Chechnya, there are “a few thousand guerrillas”,4 80,000 Russian servicemen spread out all over the province (of them approximately 40,000 from the Defence Ministry), assisted by several thousand pro-Moscow local Chechen militia.

Those inclined to take an indulgent view of the Chechen rebellion tend to speak of the Chechen Muslim militants as “soldier bandits”, “bedraggled partisans”, and “freedom fighters” moving among mountainous hideouts in a war-ravaged province, playing only a peripheral role in the conflict. Was it really international terrorism that had struck yet again, with the hostage crisis planned by al-Qaeda affiliated forces aiming “to cause a deep political and security crisis for Russia and for President Putin in particular, especially since Russia had become an important US ally in the global war on al-Qaeda”?5 Or could it be that a number of Chechens spearheading efforts to create an independent country, were adopting the language, methods and sometimes even the dress of extremist Islamic movements, and taking to terrorism to draw attention to their cause? Were Chechen civilians not fighting a legitimate war against a brutal outside invader that had caused heavy destruction and civilian casualties in Chechnya’s major cities by April 1995, and resorted to human rights violations and mass executions, contributing to driving young men into guerrilla groups, some of which have been funded by outside Arab sources?6 The war had a clear political solution, had it not? Was it not for Russia finally to confront its true cause?
When President Boris Yeltsin declared the Soviet Union finished in 1991,
and invited all Russia’s subject peoples ‘to claim as much autonomy as they can absorb’, the Chechen Parliament took him at his word and declared national independence... an independence they failed to handle, allowing instead anarchical conditions in which kidnapping and smuggling gangs and other criminal groups absorbed much of the power available.7
Wahabi Islam8 gained a foothold in Chechnya with Saudi Arabia propagating it in the Caucasus at that time, a programme not displeasing the United States since the Islamic factor was merely adding “another obstacle between Russia and control of the Caucasian oilfields”. The writing on the wall was clear by December 31, 1994, as Russia celebrated the New Year:
... young Russian conscripts in tanks and armoured personal carriers advanced into the bombed ruins of the Chechen capital, Grozny. Many had hardly left their schoolrooms. They came from Rostov in the south; from Vladivostok on the Pacific; from the Urals; from Moscow and St. Petersburg; from the Arctic north. They came from small provincial towns and from the great decaying, broken-spirited industrial heartlands of Russia. The column passed down Pervomayskaya Street towards the presidential palace, and towards the units of Chechen street-fighters lying in wait amongst the ruined apartment blocks. Armour piercing, rocket propelled grenade launchers were fired at point blank range as the Chechen snipers and light machine gunners pinned the terrified soldiers down inside their vehicles. Grenades were dropped from balconies. View ports were covered with tarpaulins. Those who clambered from their ambushed vehicles fell alongside the shattered tank tracks and the burning armour that served as crematoria for those still trapped inside... hundreds of young men lay dying in agony and terror in the Caucasus.9
As many as 2000 troops died on New Year’s Eve, providing fertile ground for a vocal anti-war sentiment, especially among the “liberal democrats” of Russia’s political classes.
Nearly a month into the siege of Grozny, the battle-lines were etched out in a tangle of twisted pylons and shattered concrete; northwards of the capital, beyond Staraya Sunzha, Chechen rebels had taken up positions in a phalanx of multi-storied apartment blocks, manning machine-gun emplacements on rooftops and balconies, enjoying a commanding view over the Russian lines. The nearby Chechen line of defence passed through a canning factory in ruins, the fighters luring the Russian assault troops into so-called “boilers”—enclosed areas where the attackers were trapped in heavy cross-fire. The Zavodsky Region in western Grozny, with communication trenches, bomb shelters and bunkers crisscrossing it, was a notorious Chechen stronghold, the guerrillas having dug deep into the foundations of dozens of former Soviet factories and oil refineries built to withstand both natural and man-made disasters.10

Chechnya, a landlocked republic covering approxi-mately 19,300 sq. km. within south-western Russia, sits between the Black and Caspian Seas and at the northern border of the Great Caucasus Range and Georgia. It is a province ethnically comprised of Turkic-Muslim people, numbering less than a million, and traditionally inclined to a Sufi Islam. The Chechens and their Ingush minority, however, are known to be among the fiercest material groups in the Russian Federation. Between 1785-1791, they battled Russian forces poised to seize the entire Caucasus from the crumbling empire of the Crimean Tatars. After being finally defeated the Chechens were incorporated into Russia, but even in Bolshevik times there were insurrections in Chechnya as in 1918, 1924, 1928, 1936, 1940 and 1942. For allegedly betraying the Soviet Union and supporting Hitler, they were deported en masse to Kazakhstan, alongwith the Kalmyks, Karachais, Balkans, Meshketian Turks, Crimean Tatars, Pontic Greeks, Kurds and Koreans, on Stalin’s orders in 1944, and permitted to return to their homes under the Soviet Communist Party leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1957. Shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Chechens declared their independence.
Several important issues are raised by the fact of the war in Chechnya finding a bulwark in Islam and a source of funding and political support in Arab nations. According to a STRATFOR.com report,
it has long been known that hundreds of Arab militants have participated in the Chechen war. It is also known that much of the financing for Chechen militants comes from Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries. During the Moscow theatre hostage crisis, the FSB (Russia’s state security service and successor to the Soviet KGB) intercepted telephone conversations between the Chechen hostage-takers and people in Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Chechnya. The meticulously planned attack on the theatre had been well funded, costing some $ 60,000. The stockpile recovered from the theatre contained the equivalent of 115 kilograms (250 pounds) of TNT according to the FSB, and included two large devices (one of which contained 50 kg. of TNT and had been planted by the Chechens in the middle of row 15), 25 smaller devices and over a 100 grenades. Washington recently acknowledged links which Moscow long has confirmed exist between al-Qaeda and Chechen militants.11
Dzokhar Dudayev, the late Chechen leader who had formerly risen in the ranks of the Soviet Air Force as a model officer—he had commanded a bomber fleet in Afghanistan that destroyed mujahideen-supported mountain villages, and been promoted to commander of a division of long range strategic nuclear bombers in Estonia—and was married to a Russian, had called for the “reunification” of the entire Muslim world in June 1994, raising the Islamic factor for the first time and describing the Chechen-Russian war as a jihad.12
In building a new generation of Chechen mujahideen, the Islamist commanders and instructors from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and numerous Arab countries —all of them veterans of the jihads in Afghanistan and the Balkans—as well as terrorists from the Middle East, have been most important. They have, moreover, constituted the core of the elite terrorist and special operations units of Chechens, and trained cadres from other Caucasian states and nationalities as well.13

Significantly, Islamabad’s direct involvement in actively supporting the Chechen jihad cause dates since the spring of 1994. It ensured the continued flow of drugs from Afghanistan to finance the Chechen revolt, particularly heroin from the Helmand valley, with the airstrip near Chitral, in Pakistan’s northwest, being used to fly out the heroin. Pakistani Minister of the Interior General Naserullah Babar, Defence Minister General Aftab Shaban Mirani, and ISI General Javed Ashraf in charge of supporting Islamic causes, all now retired, organised a comprehensive training and equipping programme for the Chechens in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Alongwith Uzbeks and Tajiks in 1994, Chechen rebel leaders like Shamil Basayev and his trusted lieutenants underwent intensive Islamic indoctrination and training in guerrilla warfare at Amir Muawia camp—set up in the early 1980s by the CIA and the ISI, and run by warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar—in Afghanistan’s Khost district. On graduating from the camp in July 1994, Basayev was transferred to the Markaz Dawar camp14—a centre for worldwide Islamist activities established by the ISI in the early 1990s—in Pakistan, where he and a few select Chechens underwent courses in advanced sabotage and guerrilla warfare.
Basayev’s high-level connections with Pakistan military and intelligence officers soon proved extremely useful. The flow of expertise and large quantities of arms and ammunition into Chechnya in autumn 1994, went hand-in-hand with the ISI-organised mixed detachments of Chechens and veteran Pakistani operatives with considerable combat experience in the mujahideen ranks in Afghanistan. “The ISI,” it might be noted, “retained combat and tactical control over these detachments. The Pakistani commanders maintained radio communications with the HQ in Pakistan, not dissimilar to communications maintained between the Islamist forces in Kashmir and their rear bases in Pakistan.”15 In ISI-sponsored camps in Afghanistan near Warsaj (Takhar province), Jabal Seraj (Parwan province), Khost (Paktia province), and other smaller sites, several hundreds of Chechens underwent training. Clandestine training was also provided to Chechens by ISI operatives and expert terrorists from Egypt and Sudan16 in a camp near Peshawar, and in sophisticated terrorism and urban warfare by the ISI in the Lahore area.
While many of the Chechen guerrillas spoke Russian fluently and had served in the Soviet and Russian armies, the training programme for young Chechens continued in terrorist schools linked to a transnational network. Chechens have been attending Islamist higher terrorism schools controlled by the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps) al-Quds forces—Iran’s overhead command for training and operational command over Sunni Islamist terrorists. Iranian intelligence and the HizbAllah in Sudan have trained several hundreds of mainly Afghan and Chechen mujahideen, who were deployed to Chechnya in late 1995 and early 1996. Chechens, sent to HizbAllah training camps in the Bekka Valley in Lebanon, attended six-month advance courses overseen by Iranian Pasdaran (IRGC) instructors, returning to Chechnya early in 1997. These training programmes for young Chechens were still continuing in early 1998.17 The affiliation of the Ansar Forces operating in Chechnya to the 4th Ansar Legion might be noted: the Legion, subordinate to the IRGC’s al-Quds Forces, is specifically responsible for the export of the Islamic Revolution to the independent republics of the former Soviet Union.18

The separatist cause of the Chechen warlords drew jihadists from four continents. The flow of mujahideen from the Arab-Afghan affiliated camps in the Sudan and Yemen, as well as arms from Iran, increased via Azerbaijan and Dagestan to Chechnya. The reinforcing guerrilla fighters included Turks, Syrians, Egyptians, battle-hardened Saudis, Kuwaitis, and other Gulf Arabs, Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian and other Maghribi Arab mujahideen, and Muslim converts from the West, including “American jihadists”.19 The latter belonged to diverse American-Muslim communities, and became radicalised either through being influenced by fire and brimstone imams in the mosques and Islamic centres of America, or while going overseas on Saudi and Pakistani scholarships to study Islam and Arabic. Subsequently recruited by more militant groups, “American jihadists” left comfortable homes behind them in Atlanta, New York and San Francisco to fight as volunteers with foreign armies in Afghanistan and Bosnia, and as mercenaries in Kashmir as well: during the 1990s alone, between 1000 and 2000 jihadists allegedly left America.20
The arrival of Wahhabite Amir Ibn-ul-Khattab in Chechnya, in early 1995, was allegedly arranged by the Saudi-Arabian based Islamic Relief Organisation, a militant religious organisation funded by mosques and affluent individuals channelling funds into Chechnya. Khattab, who was fluent in Russian, soon emerged as one of the more important foreign mujahideen commanders in Chechnya. A Bedouin, who identified himself over the years as both a Saudi Arabian and a Jordanian, Khattab was a specialist in sabotage and subversive activity with combat experience in Afghanistan, several Persian Gulf countries, and Tajikistan. When the first Chechen war (1994-1996) ended, Urus-Martan, Chechnya’s third largest city, became Khattab’s base. Setting up a terrorist-commando training school near Serzhen-Yurt, a strategic Chechen village controlling the entrance to the Vedeno Gorge, itself a strategic mountain pass in the Caucasus, in winter 1996-97, Khattab and several of his senior veteran “Afghan” and “Bosnian” mujahideen served as instructors training mujahideen fighters in Checnnya. At the Serzhen-Yurt camp, the young men recruited from Urus-Martan by the Wahhabists underwent three months of military as well as religious training. Near Nozhai-Yurt, a virtual no-man’s land in north-eastern Chechnya close to the border of the neighbouring Russian republic of Dagestan, Khattab and his Arab mujahideen operated four training centres. Khattab’s “foreign holy warrior” battalion, an elite force of seasoned Pakistan-trained mujahideen units and willing local Chechens, was responsible for major terrorist strikes in Chechnya and in neighbouring Dagestan: at Khartashoi (1995); at the tiny mountain outpost Shatoi, where 223 Russian soldiers, including 26 “senior officers”, died, and 50 military vehicles were destroyed in an ambush (1996); near Yarysh-Mardy village, where the ambushed Russian column lost 100 soldiers, the videotaped operation by Khattab’s unit revealing hideous details (1996); with Shamil Basayev in the operation to evict the Russian military from Grozny (August 1996); the attack on a military base 100 km inside Russia (December 1997)21; twice in Dagestan (1997; and August 1999), the second time when Khattab restarted the Chechen war, leading several thousand guerrillas in an armed adventure to “liberate” Dagestan from Russian control.

Khattab, who cooperated closely with Shamil Basayev, was also apparently the intermediary between the Chechen fundamentalist warlord, Arabi Barayev, and Osama bin Laden, alongside whom he had fought in Afghanistan. According to Western news reports, Osama bin Laden paid US$ 30 million as blood money to Arabi Barayev to have the Granger Telecom engineers—they were installing a mobile telephone system in the Chechen capital Grozny in October 1998—beheaded. The severed heads of 58-year-old New Zealander Stanley Shaw, Britons Darren Hickey and Rudi Petschi, aged 26 and 42 years old respectively, together with 46-year-old Peter Kennedy, a former BT employee, were found later on a highway close to the Chechen-Ingushetia border, and their bodies recovered a week later. A British inquest into the murders stated the men had been starved and beaten before having their heads sawn off with a large knife.22 Barayev was notorious as the “Terminator”, allegedly killing over 170 people including the Westerners.23 Regarding the practice of hostage-taking in order to extort money, ransoms have varied from US$ 30,000 to US$ 300,000, and the victims of Chechen field commanders have been Russians, employees from NGOs, as well as journalists.24 As backing for their demands, hostage-takers often “mutilated or executed their prisoners, videotaped the violence, and sent the videos to reluctant payers”.25 A video-tape featuring bin Laden and Khattab, found in a former al-Qaeda residence in Kabul, and obtained by Newsday for $ 500, also included “footage of ambushes and suicide-bomb attacks and showed bodies of Russian soldiers, some of them apparently executed”.26
Alongwith transnational terror networks, Chechen warlords have also taken advantage of international crime networks to further their cause. They benefited from the Golden Crescent drug trade, which had also been used to finance and equip the Bosnian Muslim Army in the early 1990s and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) subsequently. Between late 1994 and early 1995, numerous Islamic charities associated with the espousal of militant jihad, from Kashmir and Afghanistan to Bosnia, began setting up front offices in Chechnya. The flow of money and mujahideen, several of them veterans of previous jihads, soon ensued. The Illinois-based Muslim charity, Benevolence International Foundation of Palos Hills, had direct dealings with the Chechen rebels, providing them with military support, money and equipment. FBI agents, searching the Foundation’s southwest suburban offices on December 14, 2001, said “they found documents concerning the use of smallpox as a biological weapon”.27 According to the 35-page FBI affidavit, the Foundation’s executive director, 39-year-old Enaam M. Arnaout (also known as Abu Mahmoud and Adbel Samia), a Syrian-born naturalised US citizen and bin Laden associate for more than a decade, sent $ 685,560 to Chechan rebels between January and April 2000. Arnaout had previously directed arms convoys into Afghanistan and Croatia, and assisted in sending jihadists to Bosnia (“firearms, explosives and fraudulent passports were among the items found in the foundation offices raided in Bosnia-Herzegovina”). Arnaout had also financed a trip to Bosnia for key bin Laden associate Mamdouh Salim, identifying him as a charity official (Salim is awaiting trial in New York on charges of conspiracy to kill Americans in the 1988 bombings of United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania). The Benevolence International Foundation was apparently also used by bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorists for logistical support; the terrorists attempting to acquire chemical and nuclear weapons on behalf of al-Qaeda are known to have had contacts with the foundation and its office personnel.
The range of reckettering by Shamil Basayev’s group, known to have extensive links to criminal syndicates in Moscow, ties to Albanian organised crime and the KLA, involves narcotics and money laundering, illegal tapping and sabotage of Russia’s oil pipelines, kidnapping, prostitution, trading in counterfeit dollars, and smuggling of nuclear materials. The proceeds of these illicit activities have been funnelled towards acquiring equipment and seasoned fighters. Chechen warlords are linked with the Chechen mafia, which is said to still control several big hotels, the second-hand car market and several drug rings in Moscow.

¨

Along the very routes used for smuggling drugs out of Chechnya to finance the jihad there and to enrich its commanders, mujahideen and weapons were being smuggled into Chechnya by the mid-1990s. The “Abkhaz route”, operational since 1993, was controlled by the brothers Shirvan and Shamil Basayev (Basayev, it might be noted, had actively fought the Russians during the late 1980s in Abkhazia and the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh): Mi-6 helicopters from Chechnya’s Vedenskiy Raion shipped in drugs acquired from Afghanistan to the Abkhaz heliport in Novy Afon, using bases established in Dzheyrakh Gorge in Kabardino-Balkarskaya as intermediate landing points. The drug deliveries trucked onwards by Abkhaz smugglers to Sukhumi, the Abkhaz capital on the Black Sea, were then loaded on to Turkish ships bound for the port of Famagusta in Northern Cyprus, where local drug dealers took over. Arms and munitions acquired by Turkish intelligence for Basayev’s forces were loaded on to ships, trucks and helicopters on the return route. In Dudayev’s time, an airport in Bitlis, in Turkish Kurdistan, served as a refuelling point for the airlift to the Chechens of quantities of Soviet-era weapons and ammunition purchased by Turkey from Germany, from the ex-GDR arsenals. In addition, the Chechen An-24 and An-26 transports flying to Chitral for mujahideen volunteers, arms and drugs went on to Nasosnaya in Azerbaijan, making low-altitude dashes by night to Chechen air-strips in the upper gorges of Belaya Shalaza, not far from the village of Chozhi-Chu, as well as in the Shatoy region, where the ravines and rockey fastnesses conceal dozens of caves and natural hangers serving the Chechens as guerrilla bases and enabling them to move freely across the mountainous terrain, their camouflage trails sneaking out of the Vedeno gorge. Alternatively, to avoid the Russian Air Force interceptor patrols, the bulk of flights between Azerbaijan and Chechnya were from the Azerbaijani village of Zarat-2. The village also served as a Chechen forward base for a few Mi-8 helicopters proceeding to Nasosnaya for loading and refuelling, and then continuing northwest to the Chechen bases in the Zakatali region. The city of Shali in the Chechen lowlands has been another key base for exporting drugs and importing arms and ammunition (including the Soviet Igla shoulder-fired air defence missiles) acquired from a variety of illegal sources such as ex-Soviet military depots, Mongolia, Germany, Lithuania and other unidentified sources, and shipping in nuclear weapons and Islamist leaders.
With bases in the mountainous terrain of Chechnya closely resembling the harsh landscape of Afghanistan, the guerrillas have engaged the Russian Army—an ill-equipped, underpaid military force, once the pride of the world’s second superpower—in a protracted war of attrition. Apart from the special camps for guerrilla warfare training mentioned earlier, Chechen rebel bunkers are located in the Shatoi region, in the Argun Canyon around Dyshne-Vedeno, Kharachoi, Orekhovo, Shalazi, Malyye Varandy, Zony, Syuzhi, Gansolchu, Khidikhutor, and Itum-kale. The guerrillas used the tactic of cutting off supply lines and avenues of retreat to annihilate individual units advancing into the foothills with devastating effect against the Russian Army attempting to thrust armoured units into the Argun and Vedeno gorges in late December 1998. Moreover, the mountainous border with Georgia has been a channel for receiving munitions, money and mercenaries, Chechen fortified bases long being established in the Pankisi Gorge, and there being camps for both training and recuperating there.
(To be continued)

References

1. Barayev, Arbi [b. 1973, Alkhan-Kala farming village, Chechnya; died June 2001 in a six-day shoot-out with Russian forces]; received no education whatsoever; was given a job in the traffic police on account of his maternal uncle, Vakha Arsanov, who later became a Vice-President of separatist Chechnya; given later by Arsanov as a bodyguard to acting Vice-President of Chechnya, Zelimkhan Yandarbiev, who influenced Barayev’s transformation into a fierce adherent of “pure Islam”. Barayev commanded the Islamic Special Units during the 1994-96 Chechen war; acquired notoriety after the war by engaging in kidnapping and the slave trade. Through his designated representatives Barayev allegedly enjoyed informal ties with persons close to the power structure in Moscow.
Barayev’s widow was alleged to be one of the commandos in the Moscow theatre siege; the other women attackers were also widows of fighters killed in the long-running war. It might be noted that adat [an ancient system of retribution, an unwritten revenge-based code closely followed, incorpo-rating “an eye for an eye” sense of justice] and tribe or teip [the tradition of distinct clan or tribe relationships based on blood-feuds] are two clan traditions that unify the Chechen people. See: Timothy L. Thomas, “The Battle of Grozny: Deadly Classroom for Urban Combat”, Parameters, Summer 1999; available at http://carlisle-wwwarmy.mil/usawc/Parameters/99summer/thomas.htm
“Movsar also had an aunt, Khava Barayev, revered by Chechen guerrillas for her suicide car-bomb attack on a Russian base in the family’s home village of Alhan-Kala. She was 19 when she blew herself up and two soldiers in June 2000. Those who knew Movsar well say his turn had come. ‘He came to Moscow to die,’ says one Chechen associate.” [Time, November 4, 2002, p. 34]
2. Basayev, Shamil Salmanovich (b. 1965, Vedeno village, Chechnya), completed secondary education (1982); worked approximately four years at the “AK Saisky” state farm in the Volgograd region; entered the Moscow Institute of Land Exploitation Engineering (1987); spent two years in the Soviet military as a fireman. In the summer of 1991, he travelled to Afghanistan and Pakistan for guerrilla training with the mujahideen; Basayev organised “several units” to undergo training and indoctrination at the Arab mujahideen camps in Afghanistan, and the units, along with Basayev himself, were subsequently dispatched to fight with Islamic militants in Tajikistan. Gained combat experience in the Caucasus; appointed commander of the KNK (Confederation of the Peoples of the Caucasus Army) and was a fighter in the Abkhaz war against Georgia [1992-1993]; on returning to Chechnya [February 1994], created an elite unit of fiercely loyal Chechen fighters; came to Dudayev’s aid when heavily armed opposition forces tried to overrun him; became the most prominent elected leader of rebel fighters in Chechnya (1996) and led the attack on Grozny [August 1996] after which Alexander Lebed signed the ceasefire agreement; led invasion of Dagestan [September 1999].
3. It may be noted that Chechen Vice-President and former senior field commander Ahmad Zakaev “warned that the next operation might involve a nuclear reactor”. Senior Russian nuclear regulator Yuri Vishnevsky, the head of Gosatomnadzor [the Russian equivalent of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission], recently stated “that unspecified amounts of weapons grade or reactor grade nuclear material have disappeared from Russian nuclear facilities”. [Ariel Cohen, “Regional Security Implications of the Moscow Hostage-Taking”, Central Asia Caucasus Analyst, November 20, 2002, issue 5]
4. See Sharon LaFraneiere, “Russia sees longer war against Chechens”, International Herald Tribune [hereafter cited as IHT], October 29, 2002, p. 1.
5. See STRATFOR.com: Situation Report, October 24, 2002, 19:18 GMT at www.stratfor.com/sitreports.php
6. “Mutilation or torture were commonplace against Russian prisoners, further increasing stress and battle fatigue.” [Timothy L. Thomas, “Combat Stress in Chechnya: ‘The Equal Opportunity Disorder’”; available at http://fmso.leavenworth. army.mil/fmsopubs/issues/stress.htm]
7. William Pfaff, “Controlling the Caucasus”, IHT, October 31, 2002, p. 5.
8. A survey, conducted in 2001 by Dagestan State University Professor Garun Kurbanov, indicated the growing influence of Wahabbi clerics in Dagestan. “According to the study, entire villages have outlawed ‘celebrations, including weddings, concerts, radio and TV’. The study also says that over 45 per cent of Dagestanis oppose separation of religion and state, and 17 per cent support imposition of religion by force.... money from Saudi Arabia, Wahabbism’s spiritual centre, may be helping to build a solid core of Taliban-style activists in the North Caucausus.” [Ariel Cohen, “Russia and Religious Terrorism: Shifting Dangers”, January 7, 2003, a EurasiaNet Commentary; available at http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/insight/articles/eav010703.shtmll
9. See Rob Ferguson, “Chechnya: The Empire Strikes Back”, Internatiional Socialism Journal, issue 86, Spring 2000.
10. See Ruslan Isaev, “Breaking Through The Gronzy Siege”, Institute for War and Peace Reporting, January 7, 1999.
11. See STRATFOR.com Report, op. cit.
12. Dudayev, Dzokhar Musaevich (b. Feb. 1944, Yalkhori village, Pervomayskoe, Chechnya); family deported to Kazakhstan in his infancy and spent 13 years there; studied at evening school in Chechen-Ingushetia following the 1957 repatriation of Chechens and Ingush, qualifying as an electrician; graduated from the Tambov Higher Air Force Engineering School (1966); joined Communist Party (1968); studied in the Yuri Gagarin Air Force Academy (1971-74). Served in a heavy bomber unit of the Soviet Air Force in Siberia and Ukraine; commanded a strategic bomber division based near Tartu, Estonia (1987) with the rank of Major-General. Resigned his commission and returned to Grozny in 1990 and was elected head of the Executive Committee of the Nationalist Congress of the Chechen People; seized power in Grozny (August 1991), deposing the Communist leader of the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic; elected Chechen President (October 1991), winning 85 per cent of the vote, and unilaterally declared Chechnya’s independence from the Russian Fede-ration in November that year; his aggressively nationalistic anti-Russian policies undermined Chechnya’s economy and, as observers claimed, turned Chechnya into a gangster’s paradise; killed April 21, 1996, by a precision-guided bomb by Russian aircraft when using a satellite phone.
See: Yossef Bodansky [Director of the United States Congress Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare], “Chechnya: The Mujahideen Factor”, January 1998, Special Strategic Studies Supplement, Freeman Centre For Strategic Studies, Houston, Texas. [Available at www.freeman.org/m oline/bodansky/chechnya.htm; see p. 3]
13. See: Yossef Bodansky, “The Role of Islamist Terrorism”, Some Call It Peace: Waiting For War in the Balkans (Washington, D.C.: International Strategic Studies Association, 1996). Bodansky underlines: “A crucial component/aspect of the new terrorism infrastructure in and out of Bosnia-Herzegovina is the rise of the ‘Balkans’. ‘Balkans’ is now the name given to Islamist veterans of the fighting in Bosnia—the mujahedin—and the Bosnian Islamists who joined their ranks having been trained in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Sudan. Presently, the ‘Balkans’ not only concentrate in the former Yugoslavia, but increasingly contribute to other ‘battle fronts’ in the international Islamist jihad. They build on the infrastructure and traditions established by their ‘Afghan’ predecessors: those guerrilla fighters who graduated from the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan... Starting in the winter of 1995, a few hundred ‘Balkans’—both Mujahedin and Bosnian Islamists—were shipped to Turkey in a joint operation of the Turkish MIT (Milli Istihbarat Teskilati/National Intelligence Organisation) and the [Islamist] Refah [Welfare] Party. After a brief processing period in Istanbul, they were shipped to an MIT base in Northern Cyprus for advanced training. From there, the majority of these ‘Balkans’ have been deployed to Chechnya, Afghanistan for operations in Kashmir, and eastern Turkey for deniable operations against the Kurds in Turkey and northern Iraq.... These ‘Balkans’ are earmarked as the core of long-term penetration and operations throughout the Middle East and Central Asia... There are far-reaching global strategic ramifications from the rise and spread of the ‘Balkans’... ‘Balkans’ are showing up in senior positions from the US to Western Europe, from North Africa to the Middle East, and from Chechnya to Kashmir and on to Malaysia. Even though they are still very small in numbers as compared to the ‘Afghans’, their impact is greater... In the aftermath of Bosnia, the Sunni Islamist movement is being transformed into an expanding and advancing movement seeking to spread the Islamist Revolution to foreign lands... A place where this transformation is crucial and the long-term strategic ramifications are crucial is Chechnya.....The evolution of the Chechen crisis can be traced to the influence of foreigners. The ‘Afghans’, with sponsorship of, and strong support from, the Iranian, Pakistani and Turkish intelligence services accomplished the Islamicisation of what started as a national liberation movement. A major aspect of this phase was the adoption of terrorism—both deep inside Russia and overseas—as a primary instrument of the Chechen revolt. The arrival of the first ‘Balkans’, who are also sponsored and supported by these three intelligent services, facilitated the beginning of yet another profound change in the Chechen revolt. This time, there was a gradual shift to the strategic offensive with a strong pan-Turkic and pan-Islamic character. The Chechens and their Islamist allies have been reaching out to other Muslim nations in the Caucasus in an effort to organise a region-wide Islamist uprising, as well as jointly advance into Russia and the Ukraine. ‘Balkans’ operating out of Chechnya even made contacts with Islamist elements among the Crimean Tatars, urging them to join a regional jihad.” [Available online at http://members/tripod.com/Balkania/resources/geostrategy/bodansky peace/index.html]
Also see: Sharon LaFraniere, “How Jihad Made Its Way to Chechnya”, Washington Post, April 26, 2003.
14. The commanders and instructors at Markaz Dawar, known to be AIM [Armed Islamic Movement] members, were primarily Ikhwan from Algeria, Sudan, and Egypt, most of whom had fought for over a decade in Afghanistan.
15. See Bodansky, “Chechnya: The Mujahedin Factor”, op.cit., p. 4.
16. Patrolling the city of Grozny during the first Chechen war and attempting to ambush Russian units with a pair of grenade launchers, the two Egyptian brothers, Ibrahim and Hamdi Mansur from Alexandria, were detained by the Russian Counter-Intelligence Service in Chechnya: the brothers admitted to having undergone extensive guerrilla training in Arab-Afghan camps near the Sudanese capital Khartoum. Western intelligence sources confirm bin Laden and the al-Qaeda organisation directly managed and financed these camps with assistance from the Sudanese Government.
17. “Russian President Vladimir Putin has fingered bin Laden, [Lebanese Shiite Imad Fayez] Mugniyeh [head of the HizbAllah’s special-operations branch] and Iran for helping to train Chechen rebels... Speaking in Germany just 10 days after the September 11 attacks, Putin said he had given specific information to the United States on Arab fighters in Chechnya whom Mugniyeh had trained. ‘As a rule, activities of terrorists are very coordinated,’ he said. ‘For example, on one Arab mercenary in Chechnya we found instructions for flying a Boeing.’” [Kenneth R. Timmerman, “Likely Mastermind of Tower Attacks”, Insight Magazine, December 31, 2001; available at http://www.timmerman2000. com/news/insight mugniyeh011210.htm]
Mugniyeh, it may be noted, was allegedly responsible for masterminding the kidnapping of CIA station chief William Buckley in Beirut [1984], and hijacking TWA Flight 847 from Greece to Beirut [June 1985], where he held 39 Americans hostage for 17 days. He also orchestrated the hijacking of a Kuwait Airlines flight to Bangkok [April 1988] with three Kuwaiti royal family members on board, demanding the release of his brother-in-law along with 16 other Shiite prisoners in Kuwait—the “Ad-Dawaa 17”; the flight made a three-day stopover in Mashad, Iran, where some sources believe Mugniyeh personally boarded the plane and brought on additional hijackers and weapons, flying on to Cyprus subsequently, “where two Kuwaiti passengers were murdered and dumped onto the runway in a stunning replay of the TWA hijacking three years earlier”; the hijackers diverted the plane further to Algiers and secured safe passage for themelves through negotiators from the Algerian and Iranian governments, as well as Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation.
Bin Laden, reportedly, first met Mugniyeh in 1993; the latter’s HizbAllah group “provided explosives training for al-Qaeda and al-Jihad”, two groups most closely linked with bin Laden.
18. See Bodansky, “Chechnya: The Mujahedin Factor”, op. cit., pp. 12-13.
19. See: David E. Kaplan, “Made in the USA”, Nation and World, 6.10.02. [Available at www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles]
20. Ibid. Kaplan describes Jibreel al-Amreekee thus: “All of 19, the restless kid from Atlanta had grown up in a wealthy family attending Ebenezer Baptist Church.... One religion that drew his interest was Islam, and while he was at North Carolina Central University, that interest grew into a calling. By 1997, he had converted and was spending his time at the modest Ibad-ar-Rahman mosque in Durham, where African-Americans mixed easily with immigrants from Egypt and Pakistan. He fell in with a group of fundamentalists who preached of how fellow Muslims were being slaughtered overseas and how jihad—holy war—was every Muslim’s obligation. For al-Amreekee, it came as a revelation. He dropped out of school, read the Koran daily, fasted and prepared for combat overseas... In late 1997, al-Amreekee took off for Kashmir, where India and Pakistan have clashed for decades. Through friends in Durham, he hooked up with Lashkar-e-Taiba (the Righteous Army), a now banned militia blamed for last December’s terrorist attack on the Indian parliament... After training at a Lashkar base in Pakistan, al-Amreekee got his chance. His unit began ambushing Indian troops in Kashmir... After just [two and a half] months as a jihadist, he was dead—killed while attacking an Indian Army post.”
Kaplan also comments: “For 20 years—long before ‘American Taliban’ John Walker Lindh—American jihadists have ventured overseas to attack those they believe threaten Islam. It is a little-known story.”
See: Matt Bivans’ article on Aukai Collins, “An American Fighter’s War in Chechnya”, The Moscow Times, July 21, 2003, pp. 1, 2 and 4; also see: Aukai Collins, My Jihad: The True Story of An American Mujahid’s Amazing Journey from Usama Bin Laden’s Training Camps to Counter terrorism with the FBI and CIA (Guildford CT: Lyon’s Press, 2002). It may be noted that Collins, the son of a US Marine who served in Vietnam, received weapons training with the mujahideen harassing Russian forces in Tajikistan, and among whom was Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, sentenced to death for the murdering of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Going on to Chechnya, Collins fought alongside guerrilla commanders Shamil Basayev and Khattab. As part of the FBI’s counterterrorism team in Phoenix, Arizona [1996-1999], Collins claims to have moved in circles that included Hani Hanjour, the man believed to have piloted American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
21. See last part of this article for details of the attack on Buinaksk.
22. See: “Britons killed by Bin Laden ally”, BBC News, November 18, 2001, 18:49 GMT at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk news/1663278.stm Also see: “Chechnya kidnap victims dead”, BBC News, December 8, 1998, 17:07 GMT, at http://news. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/230215.stm
It might be noted that the hostages were seized from their home in Grozny, in October 1998, “in a spectacular attack mounted just a few hundred metres from Chechnya’s special anti-hostage task force”.
The kidnappings followed shortly after the release of British aid workers and hostages Jon James and Camilla Carr [September 1998], who were held for over a year after being kidnapped in July 1997, in Chechnya.
Earlier, in December 1996, Chechen assailants using handguns with silencers, murdered six Red Cross workers, five of them women, while they were asleep in the ICRC facilities in Nvoye Atagi, Chechnya.
23. See STRATFOR.com Report, October 23, 2105 GMT.
24. See: Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus (New York: London University Press, 1998).
25. See: Charles Tilly, “Violence, Terror, and Politics As Usual”, Boston Review, University of Illinois Press. [Available at http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR27.3/tilly.html]
26. See “Notebook: Video ties al-Qaeda to Chechen rebels”, The Seattle Times, January 20, 2002. [Available at: http://seattletimes.hwsource.com/htm’/nationalworld/134393450-notebook 20html]
“The video, which was reportedly obtained from a Kabul landlord, was reported by Matthew McAllester in Newsday on 20 January... The tape appears to have been produced in 2000 for propaganda purposes, including to show potential donors the extent of al-Qaeda aid to Chechens in what bin Laden considers part of his holy war against Christian forces... In the video, Khattab is shown at a meeting of Chechen rebel fighters, introducing two Arab men in combat fatigues. ‘They are here to help us and they want to teach us,’ he says.” [“Chechens and al-Qaeda”, RFERL Crime, Corruption, and Terrorism Watch: Reporting on Organised Crime, Corruption, and Terrorism in the former USSR, East Europe, and the Middle East, January 31, 2002, Volume 2, Number 4]
27. See: Marcella S. Kreiter, “Charity head accused of terrorist ties”, United Press International [UPI], Chicago, April 30, 2002. [Available at http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breakking/30042002-024715-1563r.htm]

Well that may have been your experience from your internet arguements, but it terms of politics in the West most of the left-wing parties (eg Liberal Democrats (UK), Democrats (USA), current German and Spanish governments) all have a more dhimmified/pro-Islamic agenda than their right wing counterparts (Conservatives/Labour (UK), Republican (USA), current German opposition party, ex-Spanish government).

Its one of the strange facets of modern politics, the way the political left (including many of its organisations and bodies) has alligned itself with Islam (eg the ACLU in the US, the new "Respect" party in the UK, and many more examples are on this site and others).

As Daniel Pipes has said in an article on his website, anti-semitism (and IMO pro-Islamism too) have moved from the right wing to the left wing.

Did Osama bin Laden order beheading of three Britons?
Chances are YES

^ that comment was supposed to be a reply to Giaour

tranmere_rover
No

It was for all who keep slagging anybody who views are different than there own

Why not get right to the VERY 'root' of the serious VICIOUSNESS of the beheadings that are being carried out by Muslims?

"""families of three Britons beheaded by Islamic terrorists are hoping that their killer will finally reveal if Osama bin Laden ordered their captives' murder"""