A Chechen exile claims that Russia will intensify its efforts to fabricate the links tying Georgia to al Qaeda in the North Caucasus context

On October 13, 2009, during U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's first official visit to Russia, the Chairman of the National Anti-Terrorist Committee (NAC) and the head of the Federal Security Service (FSB), Aleksandr Bortnikov (see the photo on the right courtesy of Kommersant) made the following remark during his speech at the NAC meeting:

"The audio reports discovered among the militants indicate that they jointly with the al Qaida emissaries have established contacts with the representatives of the Georgian special services, who participate in training and transfer of terrorists to the territory of the Chechen Republic.

In addition, they constantly carry out attempts to transfer weapons, explosives and funds for organizing sabotage operations at high-risk facilities of Dagestan, and, above all, at oil- and gas pipelines."

At first it seems this remark and its timing are not particularly surprising considering the well-established pattern of disinformation campaigns that the Kremlin periodically unleashes against Tbilisi to justify its bullying tactics against its impetuous southern neighbor. But the plot unexpectedly thickened when the once prominent Chechen exile in London, Akhmed Zakaev stepped into fray to provide some very interesting caveats. In the long and wide-ranging interview published in the popular Russian magazine Kommersant-Vlast No.42 (845) of October 26, 2009, among many interesting observations about his interactions with the pro-Moscow Chechen leadership, Zakaev noted the following:

Kommersant-Vlast Correspondent Musa Muradov: Why did the Sharia' court of Dokku Umarov sentence you to death?

Akhmed Zakaev: I was against the creation of the Caucasus Emirate. I wrote to Dokku that by declaring himself an Emir, he was going against the interests of the Chechen people.

Q: You are claiming that the Caucasus Emirate is the project of the special services. But Umarov's militants kill the Russian police officers and the special services operatives. Why would they create an enemy for themselves?

A: Since the announcement of the Caucasus Emirate, this war has turned into the war between the Caucasus people. In Chechnya Chechens are killed every day. In Ingushetia Ingushs. The local residents perish in Kabarda-Balkaria, Dagestan. The machine of self-destruction of the peoples of North Caucasus has been jump started.

Q: But during the special operations, I repeat, the FSB operatives die too.

A: Well they will be killed too. The Islamic militants, who fight in the North Caucasus, they are, of course, not the FSB agents. They are poisoned by the ideology, which they sincerely believe in and they believe that whatever they do now is exactly what is needed. And this is why they kill indiscriminately - police officers, FSB operatives and military personnel. The spiritual instructor of these duped boys has become Said Buriyatskiy, whose real last name is Tikhomirov. This person does not give a damn about the Chechens and their independence.

Putin stated that the Chechens fight not for the independence of the Chechen state, but for the creation of the Caliphate from sea to sea and you want us to allow them to carry on? We cannot allow them to do so! And this project has been in the works for some time. They have been working on it for a long time because earlier they wanted to transfer the national liberation movement into the sphere of struggle against the international terrorism. The project "Caucasus Emirate," and we can prove it, was developed at Lubyanka and was implemented by the FSB operatives. The project authors conceived that after its launch the struggle of the Chechen people for its freedom and independence would be presented as the struggle against the unbelievers. And Russia would transform from the aggressor that committed war crimes on the territory of Chechnya to the victim of the global jihad. And everyone sympathizing with or supporting the legitimate demands of the Chechen people would be equated with the accomplices of the Islamic extremists. According to our information, in the foreseeable future the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs is preparing to present to the United Nations Security Council the request regarding the recognition of the Caucasus Emirate as part of the al Qaeda, which will be complete with materials indicating the cooperation between the Georgian special services and the representatives of Dokku Umarov and the Caucasus Emirate. And the recent statement by the head of the FSB of Russia Bortnikov that there is al Qaeda in Georgia and that they [the Georgians] are helping to transport terrorists to the territory of Chechnya is precisely the kind of prelude to what they [the Russians] are preparing.