Conflicted - Enter Russia
Conflicted is back with the third episode of Season Two. This episode is a deep dive into Russian foreign policy after the end of the Cold War and the sometimes surprising ways it intersects with the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East.
Listen now wherever you get your podcasts, and as always you can read the transcript below!
Read the full transcript here
Conflicted S2E3 transcript
THOMAS: Hello Aimen.
AIMEN: Hello, Thomas.
THOMAS: Today we're going to talk about Russia.
AIMEN: Can I just mention like, you know, my first, you know landing in Azerbaijan?
THOMAS: Well you will, but when it gets there, sure, absolutely.
AIMEN: Because it was so funny story about how, you know…
THOMAS: Not yet.
AIMEN: Yeah, okay.
[Laughter]
[THEME MUSIC]
THOMAS: We have a very complicated episode of Conflicted to record today.
AIMEN: Every episode is complicated, Thomas.
THOMAS: This one is going to prove perhaps the most complicated. We're going to talk, as we have been talking about, the New World Order – America's attempt to create an American-led global, if you like, regime of free market capitalism and perhaps even liberal democracy everywhere following the end of the Cold War. In the last episode, I suggested that America faced three primary challenges in order to achieve that ambition. We discussed how one of the challenges, sorting out the middle East, has failed. Another challenge, incorporating China into the world, we're going to discuss in the next episode. In this episode, we're talking about Russia and America's need to get Russia onside to create a new partnership with Russia if its New World Order ambitions were to be satisfied. So, let’s start with a rough historical sketch of the Soviet Union, its breakup, and Russia’s fortunes after the end of the Cold War. For the 45 years following the second world war, the Soviet Union, as it then was, was the big baddie of the world as far as the West was concerned. America and the Soviet Union were fighting. By 1991, the Soviet Union has collapsed. Its Eastern European satellite states are independent. Poland, Czechoslovakia as it then was, Romania, et cetera. The Warsaw pact, which was the communist equivalent of NATO, has broken down. Russia narrowly avoids civil war when Boris Yeltsin in, in what was considered at the time an act of heroism, saves the day, becomes the president of newly independent Russia, or the Commonwealth of Independent States, as it was called. Now at this point, what happens? A kind of… confused logic at the heart of America's New World Order played out as NATO expanded into these countries, extended its umbrella across them. That was very provocative to Russia. The EU and its ever-desperate attempt to expand its own pool of cheap labor moves into Eastern Europe as well. Uh, eventually even flirting with moving into the Ukraine, which was one of the reasons why the Ukrainian civil war would, would would break out in 2014. So, we did almost immediately see how incorporating Russia into the New World Order forming a new partnership with it, wasn't necessarily going to work. And it was disastrous for the economy as a whole. In the 90s the Russian economy was chaotic at best.
AIMEN: Remember 1998? The collapse? I mean, it was awful.
THOMAS: Overnight the Ruble collapsed and you know, any, any lingering dream that following the fall of the Soviet Union the Russian economy might boom and Russia might match, you know, match the, the prosperity of the West… was destroyed. But first of all, to start us off, what does Aimen Dean, former jihadist, have to tell us about Russia?
AIMEN: It seems for some reason, basically, that I always used to pop up in places where Russia, you know, had a beef or two with. I was in Bosnia, I was in Afghanistan and I was in the Caucuses. Um, you know, supporting the Chechen jihadists.
THOMAS: Chechnya, for the listener, is a tiny Muslim country—officially called the Chechen Republic and is a part of Russia. It’s located in the North Caucuses, that sliver of mountainous land between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea. Now, Russia’s relationship with Chechnya over the past thirty years is a great illustration of the way Russia responded and adapted to America’s New World Order. And Aimen, you were involved in the Chechen Jihad, were you? When did it all begin?
AIMEN: The first Chechen-Russian war really started in 1994, it was almost two years conflict. When Dzhokar Dudayev, uh, the president, the first declared, self-declared president of the Chechen Republic, declared independence from Russia.
THOMAS: Part of the wider trend following this collapse of the Soviet union for Russian satellite states, certainly in Eastern Europe but also within places like the Caucuses, to declare independence. To wrest independence away from the, the evil Russians who had dominated them for, in some cases, centuries.
AIMEN: Of course. I mean, basically the Chechen-Russian Wars, or I would say basically the Northern Caucuses-Russian Wars, you know, lasted since the days of Catherine the Great.
THOMAS: Yeah, they’re proverbial. And you know, the Caucasian peoples of the North Caucuses are famously warlike.
AIMEN: Very much so. Few in number in comparison to the numerous Russians. But nonetheless, I mean, they were really formidable foes, you know, to the Russians. And I was there, you know, witnessing the first conflict, um, evolving.
THOMAS: So how did you get there? After you left Bosnia, uh, in ‘95 would it have been?
AIMEN: Yes. I mean, by late ‘95 in, uh, the Bosnian war came to an end. And so, uh, before I went to Afghanistan, there was a detour where I went to Azerbaijan and then later Georgia in order to become what we, what I always used to term as an office jihadist.
THOMAS: But at that time you weren't actually a member of Al-Qaeda. You were a kind of freelance jihadist. Who arranged for you to go to Azerbaijan and then to Georgia in order to join the Chechen fight against, uh, against Russia?
AIMEN: Ah. Now in order for this story to make sense, we need to understand the life, or at least the name, of one single individual. He is known in the jihadist circles as Ibn Khattab.
THOMAS: Ibn Khattab.
AIMEN: Yes. Now, Ibn Khattab, you know he was assassinated by the Russians in the year 2002. You know, using a poisoned letter.
THOMAS: In Chechnya?
AIMEN: In Chechnya.
THOMAS: Is this man a Chechen?
AIMEN: No. He is from nowhere else except my hometown. Hubbard in Saudi Arabia.
THOMAS: Oh, what a marvelous city Hubbard is.
AIMEN: [Laughter] Hey, we gave the world Aramco! And we gave the world the list of famous terrorists
[Laughter]
THOMAS: None more famous than Aimen Dean.
AIMEN: Oh dear.
THOMAS: So, Ibn Khattab… Why did the Russians assassinate him in 2002 and what does he have to do with you?
AIMEN: Well. First of all, even Khattab was my hometown boy. In fact, he went to the same school I went to except he went… he went many years earlier. And then he went to the Afghan jihad in 1989. Then he made the detour into Chechnya in 1994 when they declared independence because he wanted to lead the first Arab jihadist or international jihadist contingent to fight the Russians there… in Chechnya. The war really was mainly anti-Russian as in the Russian, you know, state itself. So, it was about being pro-independence for Chechnya. Not only Chechnya, but also the other Muslim republics like the Dagestan…
THOMAS: All these places in the Caucuses.
AIMEN: Exactly. So, the whole idea was about an Islamic awakening in the Caucuses. It wasn't meant to be anti-Russian. If it was any other nationality there, it would have been anti that nationality, anti that ethnic, anti that state in order to start something, because… why? Chechnya is a mountainous country with warlike, devout Muslim people. But of course, Ibn Khattab, uh, being an international jihadist who spent years in Afghanistan, decided the Chechnya is the next Afghanistan. Because it's going to spread from there into the rest of the Caucuses. And it's a mountainous region. It's sandwiched between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea. It's perfect.
THOMAS: And Ibn Khattab just called you up, you're in Bosnia, you get a call from Ibn Khattab, he said: “Come on over to Chechnya! Fight some Russians!”.
AIMEN: Well, I, I'm, I'm flattered you say that he called me, but no, he didn't. It was his financier from Saudi Arabia who said: “Well, we need you there, but you know, I have bad news for you. You are not going to the front straight away. You know, we need you basically to run some logistics in the office in Azerbaijan. And then later in Georgia.” So actually, I went there to become someone who basically add up sums, make sure basically that enough supply of mayonnaise and other materials basically made it into Chechnya.
THOMAS: An accountant and a grocery supply, uh, agent.
AIMEN: Exactly. Which actually, you know… was boring. But nonetheless, that was an eye opening. Because I started learning Russian, uh, because it's easier basically if you are going to cross many different, uh, Caucus states, whether it's Georgia, Osettia or Azerbaijan or Dagestan… I mean, they speak so many different local languages and learning one local language is a waste of time. Just learn Russian. Everyone speaks Russian there. So basically, that was the time when I started learning Russian.
THOMAS: So you never fought the Russians in Chechnya?
AIMEN: Well, I didn't fight them with bullets just with jars of mayonnaise.
THOMAS: Mayonnaise? What are you talking about?
AIMEN: Well you know, one of the requests, the frequent requests, I used to get from Ibn Khattab and his group of Jihadists in Chechnya was to keep sending them, you know, hundreds of jars of mayonnaise. Because in the mountains, mayonnaise was the source of protein that maintain, maintained them basically, maintain their levels of energy.
THOMAS: That is so weird. Are we talking about like Kraft mayonnaise? Jars of American made mayonnaise?
AIMEN: Yes.
THOMAS: But mayonnaise goes off so easily. It doesn't last long.
AIMEN: Not in the cold mountains of Chechnya.
THOMAS: So when that first Chechen war against Russia ended in ’96, why did it start again three years later?
AIMEN: That's when I can tell you the entire story as to why it all happened. It all come down to that man I mentioned, Ibn Khattab. And many of his deputies, who many of them come from my city again, Hubbard. I'm sorry about that. I, on behalf of all the good, decent people of Hubbard, I apologize to the world.
[Laughter]
AIMEN: Um, so what happened is that because these, you know, the Chechens follow a particular brand of Islam which is Sufism. You know, it's mythic, it's ritualistic. But Ibn Khattab and the mainly Saudi and Jordanian, uh, jihadists who arrived in Chechnya…
THOMAS: All of them Salafists really.
AIMEN: Salafist, Wahhabis as they are called, basically…
THOMAS: …and therefore anti-Sufi. In theory, they don't like Sufism at all.
AIMEN: Exactly. So Ibn Khattab realized that the Sufis are compromisers who compromised, um, on the goals, you know, basically off the Chechan uprising in 1996 when they negotiated with, uh, the Russian government in Moscow to achieve some sort of autonomy within elections and a referendum later, on full independence.
THOMAS: So in Ibn Khattab’s mind, the Chechen leadership sort of betrayed the jihad by signing a peace agreement with Boris Yeltsin and the Russian government.
AIMEN: Exactly. I mean, it was Alexander Lebed, you know, a famous Russian general and then later politician, uh, who brokered this deal, uh, with the then Chechen president Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev.
THOMAS: So how did, uh… what did Ibn Khattab do next?
AIMEN: As any good Jihadi Salafists, you know, on the same lines of Al Qaeda would do: establish a religious academy to graduate, uh, local Chechens and Dagestanis and other Caucuses minorities to become Salafi preachers.
THOMAS: He, he sort of educated them.
AIMEN: Oh he brought, you know, quite a few preachers from Saudi Arabia. Uh, of course, with the disapproval of the Saudi government. Many of them became, you know, wanted by the Saudi government because the Saudi government and Russia had a good relationship at the time. So, they were brought in order to teach a new generation of Chechens and Dagestanis other Caucuses minority people the principles of Salafism so they spread it and therefore dilute the Sufi character of the Caucus’s Muslims.
THOMAS: They must have worked very fast. If by 1999, only three years later, another war breaks out between Chechnya and Russia.
AIMEN: Indeed, and actually I go into quite, you know, in detail analysis of this in my book..
THOMAS: Ah! Aimen, so shameless plugging your book in the middle of our conversation.
AIMEN: I know I'm not being, you know, not trying to advertise anything here. But I talk about, you know, the reason why the second Russian-Chechan war started, which is the fact that they did not want to just remain confined within the borders of Chechnya. Because they had almost full independence by then! Although not recognized by the UN or anything, but they were on their way to have a full independence by 2002, 2003. But for Ibn Khattab and the Salafists and as you know, basically the Salafi jihadism do not believe in borders. For them borders, you know, they are just lines… you know, dotted on a map that has no meaning whatsoever. They wanted Dagestan The bigger… well, the biggest Republic within the…
THOMAS: Muslim Caucuses.
AIMEN: Yes, Muslim Caucauses to become independent and so they made more and more incursions, killed so many Russian soldiers, you know, Dagestani police who are cooperating with the Russians. And as a result, the Russians were threatening again and again that they will do something. But Yeltsin wanted to maintain the peace. However, something that the jihadists, did not, uh, take into account. Which is: while they were planning to launch massive attacks inside Russia, in Moscow itself, against the Russian army residential compounds, you know, which will kill at least 300 Russian soldiers and their families, uh, and wound another 600 in September and August of 1999, they did not count that Yeltsin who was changing prime ministers more than he was changing his socks, would appoint the head of the FSB, you know the…
THOMAS: The successor to the KGB.
AIMEN: Absolutely. I mean, the head of the Russian intelligence, Vladimir Putin, as his prime minister.
THOMAS: Ah! Vladimir Putin. I wondered when he’d come up.... Because Vladimir Putin is obviously an enormously important figure from recent history about which much has been written… much is said. He's played the role, something of the classic Russian bogeyman for the West and the world for the last 20 years now it's been a long time.
AIMEN: But who created him? Who made him into what he is right now?
THOMAS: And you're saying that the Chechnyan war has everything to do with his emergence as, as the new Russian strong man.
AIMEN: I can assure you that it almost the catalysts which propelled him into the leadership. And I tell you why. I met in 2013 with a senior Russian diplomat, slash spy most likely, and he's basically had a personal friendship with Putin. And he said that when he was appointed as prime minister he saw this as some sort of a destiny, fate calling him. And he basically, you know, as a devout Orthodox Christian, he saw that being a prime minister is a calling. But he needed a sign from God. That this is his destiny to fulfill.
THOMAS: Before you tell me what that sign was, I just want to press you on this. Putin a devout Orthodox Christian. I am, as it happens, an Orthodox Christian, because I, you know, I even lived in an Orthodox monastery for a while. I would question your description of Vladimir Putin as a devout Orthodox Christian. I admit to you that he definitely pretends to be an Orthodox Christian and invokes Orthodox Christian symbolism, uh, in, in the new Russia that he's building. Which, uh, which, you know, he's trying to kind of, he's trying, trying to bring back the glory days of the old Orthodox czarist empire. But a devout Orthodox Christian? Really?
AIMEN: Well, I have to take the word of the person who told me. Who basically is a senior diplomat and someone basically who knew Putin quite well.
THOMAS: Okay. So what was the sign from heaven that devout Orthodox Christian Vladimir Putin was looking for?
AIMEN: The bombings of the army barracks in Moscow.
THOMAS: Tell us that story. Tell us the story of the Chechen jihadists and your hometown boy Ibn al-Khattab’s attack on the barracks in Moscow.
AIMEN: Well, the jihadists for 19 months, and I go into great details of that, of that operation in my book, but the jihadist planned for 19 months to avenge massacres, took place in Dagestan and Chechnya by the OMON and the Alpha, uh, units of the Russian Special Forces. They located where these special forces live alongside their families in military compounds and they attacked them in the summer of, uh, 1999. Just weeks after Putin was sworn in as the prime minister of Russia.
THOMAS: What did Putin do?
AIMEN: Putin saw this is as ‘This is the Lord's calling’. That's what he basically, you know, interpreted these attacks. Russia is challenged and therefore we should not shy away from more. Until then, basically the Russians suffered major losses in the first Chechen war, and they were not organized and they didn't have a good leadership. Yeltsin was a drunk, you know, incompetent idiot. But Putin decided that he will take charge of this Russian war you know, using his exceptional skills as a spy in order to execute the, uh, war against these people. So, this is why I always say that it is ironic that as Russian bombs are falling on jihadists in Syria, I always used to say ‘You want to blame someone? Blame yourselves. You made this man when you bombed Moscow in 1999.’
THOMAS: How was that greeted in the West? Because I imagine at the time the West must have itself been shocked, uh, at such a heinous crime by jihadists in Moscow.
AIMEN: Well, actually the West believed that it was Putin who orchestrated the whole thing.
THOMAS: Why did they think that?
AIMEN: Well, first of all, basically, okay. There is this man, he is the head of the FSB, the Soviet intelligence. So now he is the head of the Russian Intelligence. Then he became a prime minister. And then suddenly there are these, there are these bombings which basically you know making him so angry that he basically invade Chechnya again. And surprisingly, drive away the jihadists way into the mountains and take back Grozny and other Chechen cities. Uh, so everyone was saying… ‘Oh, how convenient, the timing. You become prime minister, six weeks later, you know, the pretext for the war that will make you a war hero and Russia’s strong man to the point where Boris Yeltsin appoint you as his successor. I mean, how convenient!’
THOMAS: But you're saying that's not true?
AIMEN: Not true. Because why? In Christmas of 1999 I just returned back from [Afghanistan. I was, you know, loaded with letters from Al Qaeda to say certain operatives here in London…
THOMAS: You're already a double agent at this time.
AIMEN: Exactly. I was already spying for MI6 and these letters actually were already opened, expertly scanned, and then put back again as if they were never opened. And then I have to deliver them myself without knowing the content. So… So basically I was supposed to deliver some of the letters to Abu Qatada, you know, famous, you know, Al Qaeda linked cleric who was based in London.
THOMAS: Abu Qatada… gosh, up takes me back.
AIMEN: Exactly. So I called him and he said “Come tonight.” It was Ramadan I remember. He said “Come tonight after the evening prayers. You will be hearing from an old friend of yours. So I said “Okay, fine. I'm coming.” So when I went to his house, we were sitting around, you know, like corporate managers, five of us. We were sitting around a speaker phone and from Tbilisi in Georgia, we were listening to Abu Sa‘id al-Khudri who I knew from Afghanistan years earlier. He was the head of the logistics for the Chechan jihadists.
THOMAS: Ah.
AIMEN: Including Ibn Khattab because he planned the whole thing. He told us when we asked him you know, “Was it disadvantageous to you?” Because even us thought that Putin did it.
THOMAS: You asked him about the, about the attack in Moscow.
AIMEN: Exactly. So you know, it's good basically that the whole thing was recorded. So, um, so basically I asked uou know “Was it disadvantageous that the war, you know, the, the timing of the war was determined by the Russians?” And so he asked “What do you mean, determined by the Russians?” “Uh, well, because Putin carried out, you know, these attacks in Moscow as a pretext”
THOMAS: A false flag. A false flag mission.
AIMEN: Exactly. False flag. I mean, it has all the hallmark of a false flag. And he said “No, we did it.” And he went on to explain the whole process, the reasoning, the pretext, and why they did it. It was damning evidence because he talked about details only the bombers would have known.
THOMAS: So, you have just been told from the horse's mouth as it were…
AIMEN: Yes.
THOMAS: …that what the whole West believed that Putin had launched a false flag operation killing his own soldiers in Moscow was not true. The jihadists had actually done it.
AIMEN: Yes.
THOMAS: And it was just amazingly convenient for him. A sign from God even.
AIMEN: A sign from God like in the later years, like you know, almost 15 years later I had a Russian diplomat who knew him told me that he viewed this as a sign from God. I, however, immediately called my MI6 handlers and told them, that “There is something that you need to know. And immediately.” So we met, I told them the information. It was a bombshell and it landed on Tony Blair's desk within days, basically. And as a result, he shared it with other world leaders and suddenly Putin was no longer treated as a pariah. Putin was treated as a victim of terrorism. And Tony Blair invited him to a pub a few weeks later where they shared the pint. They were wearing jeans and casual and everything, and suddenly everything seemed in a going Putin’s way.
THOMAS: But his reputation did not remain very high in the estimation of the West. What happened? Why? Why did the… People forget now because Putin is a big bad guy, but in the noughties, he wasn't a big bad guy. He sort of was playing along.
AIMEN: He was playing along, but then he was playing along, but then several things happened along the way. 9/ 11 happened. And not many people know but again, jihadists. Putin’s path was forged by jihadists. You know, if you want to blame, you know the rise of Putin on anyone, it's the bloody jihadists.
THOMAS: So why didn’t 9/11 have an impact on, on Putin?
AIMEN: Okay. So, he thought that 9 11 is a good thing in a sense that basically the Americans will realize finally that there is a serious war against terrorism.
THOMAS: He'd been fighting jihadists in Chechnya. And now he says, look, we're all fighting jihadists.
AIMEN: Absolutely. And he offered his help, you know, against the Taliban. Which he did actually. You know, the Russian military and intelligence provided, you know significant help to the US and the UK war efforts in Afghanistan.
THOMAS: And of course, they were experts on Afghanistan. They'd fought in Afghanistan for 11 years.
AIMEN: Exactly! And they have their own assets there, they have their own allies…
THOMAS: So Putin was an ally of the West in the war on terror.
AIMEN: Absolutely.
THOMAS: What happened to change that?
AIMEN: Iraq war….Because Putin was absolutely against it.
THOMAS: Because?
AIMEN: First, he believed that Saddam Hussein, just like Bashar al-Assad and others, they are the pillars of stability. They are, you know, the pillars of Arab nationalism because Arab nationalism protected Arab Christians. Because you know, look at who was Saddam's foreign minister? Tariq Aziz.
THOMAS: Yes, Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi deputy prime minister and foreign minister under Saddam Hussein.
AIMEN: He was a Christian. And there were many Christian officers in Saddam's army and in Saddam's government and in Saddam's Ba'ath Party.
THOMAS: Certainly in Syria, the Christian community are very close to the Assad regime.
AIMEN: Exactly. I mean, he viewed both Saddam and al-Assad as the pillars of Arab nationalism and Arab nationalism was an important buffer against Islamic extremism.
THOMAS: So Putin begins to realize that America's war on terror is not being prosecuted wisely.
AIMEN: No, he started to see that the war on terror had a more sinister ulterior motive. He started to doubt whether the neo-cons of Washington really wanted to fight terrorism or wanted to basically, you know, have an American hegemony in a project in the middle East. Which would then basically make America far more powerful because they will have access to the world natural resources. They can then flood the market with cheap, Iraqi oil, which would then undermine the Russian economy. Russia was a massive net exporter. So if you bring down the price of energy, both oil and gas, then the Russian economy would suffer significantly. So he saw that you know, with America being there, America will have its you know basically its foot on the hose like they can basically just press and cut, you know, the dollars to theRussian economy by manipulating oil prices.
THOMAS: This is very interesting because this is putting us into Putin's head. And often, you know, people aren't encouraged to see the world from Putin's point of view. Now….
AIMEN: By the way, I'm not the Putin apologist. I'm just basically stating facts. I don't like the man. I don't like what the Russians did in Syria whatsoever. I condemn it with the most, you know, you know, strongest way possible. I condemn it the strongest way possible. But we have to talk about facts. Here at Conflicted we are dissecting conflicts in order to come up with the right diagnostics.
THOMAS: So, from Putin's point of view, he's looking out at a certain foreign policy decisions that America is making and realizing ‘I'm not sure I really want to be a part of this new world order or I'm not sure if this new world order actually has my best interests in mind.’ Of course, there are other foreign policy decisions that America makes in this time. It expands NATO into former Warsaw pact countries.
AIMEN: Yep.
THOMAS: This is happening in conjunction with the EU which is trying to expand its influence into former Warsaw pact countries in Eastern Europe, which, which Russia considers to be something of a threat to its sphere of influence and this definitely includes the Ukraine as I mentioned before.
AIMEN: Thomas, remember… Kiev?
THOMAS: Well the Orange Revolution in Kiev... I mean, Ukraine would definitely come up in this conversation because we all know that, uh, that a civil war has been raging in Ukraine for six years now. Russia has covertly, sometimes overtly, intervened on the side of the Eastern Ukrainian pro-Russian separatists.
AIMEN: Yeah. And guess whose forces, whose irregular forces are fighting in Ukraine now alongside the Russians or alongside the pro-Russian separatists in order to keep K… you know, the Ukrainian forces at Bay.
THOMAS: Don't tell me the president of Chechnya is…
AIMEN: Yes. Ramzan Kadyrov…
THOMAS: Alrght, for the listener… Ramzan Kadyrov became president of Chechnya in 2007. His father was also president, though he was assassinated in 2004. Now Ramzan Kadyrov… the thing is he has this cherubic face. He looks like a little baby with his sort of soft, downy beard. But he’s a really fucking hard guy. He’s a real tough warlord.
AIMEN: He has a private army of many Caucuses Muslims, Sufis who are, you know, brave warriors. And…
THOMAS: A private army?
AIMEN: A private army…
THOMAS: You mean it's not the army of Chechnya?
AIMEN:
No, it is basically a private army you know, of Ramzan Kadyrov and they are deployed according to whatever they are needed. So in Syria they are deployed. They are between 4 and 5,000 of them. They are deployed as the Russian military police in order to, uh, police, newly liberated areas where I know… basically so-called liberated areas from the opposition. But because they are Sufi Sunni Muslims, they make it easy for the Syrian population to accept them.
THOMAS:
Uh, I mean, this is blowing my mind. A private army separate from the Chechnyan military. This, this is very much like…
AIMEN:
They are the Chechnyan military, but they are not a regular Russian military.
THOMAS:
This is, this is similar to the privatization of espionage you were talking about in the first episode. Are we seeing the privatization of the military completely?
AIMEN:
Not only that, Ramzan Kadyrov has his own mercenaries fighting alongside, you know, UAE and Saudi Arabia forces in Yemen. They are fighting alongside Haftar, General Haftar in Libya. You know, it's all for money. And he has actually a military Academy, uh, in Grozny where he is training…
THOMAS:
In Chechnya.
AIMEN:
In Chechnya. Where he is training, you know, soldiers from Saudi Arabia, from the UAE, from Nepal. You know, even Nepalis Gurkas in order to be deployed to war zones according to the whims of certain leaders in the middle East.
THOMAS:
War zones, including the war zone in Eastern Ukraine.
AIMEN:
In Eastern Ukraine and wherever Putin wants them to.
THOMAS:
This is amazing. So, Putin rises to power in 1999 on the back of Chechnyan separatism, he crushes Chechnyan separatism, installs in Chechnya a president that is basically his lapdog and now Chechnyan soldiers are everywhere fighting… jihadists, fighting anti-Russian forces, fighting whoever. They're the great mercenaries of the world?
AIMEN:
Yeah. And they are devout Muslims who believed, who believe that, you know, Russia is actually pushing back America's evil influence and therefore they are fighting Putin's jihad. I know it's, it's mind boggling.
THOMAS:
I'm actually speechless cause there's just such a conflation of everything we've talked about now for, you know, for almost a year… You know, Russia, it's not actually that Russia is simply geopolitically America's enemy. But Russia has actually allied itself with Islamists who think that America is the antichrist. And in a similar vein, before you brought up Russia’s presence in Syria today because it's an amazing thing. It's in fact one of the most amazing things about America's failure in the Middle East, that for so many decades, America did whatever it could to prevent Russia from, uh, having a untrammeled control of a swathe of the middle East. And yet now we have Russia, which can do more or less what it wants throughout Syria.
AIMEN:
Exactly.
THOMAS:
Now. They're there for many reasons. Why is Russia in Syria?
AIMEN:
Again, that diplomat who I spoke to… and… he said that there are multitude of reasons why the Russians felt confident enough that they can intervene in Syria. Because one, Obama is weak and wobbling and wasn't willing to intervene. And that even though Assad cross the red line, the chemical weapons red line, twice, Obama did not do anything.
THOMAS:
Obama's… Obama's lack of response emboldened Putin, fine. But that's not why he's there.
AIMEN:
The second reason we have an intervention in Russia, according to the diplomat is that again, it comes back to Putin's, you know, if it's not belief in the Christian Orthodox church at least it is, you know, acquiescing to the pleas by the Russian Orthodox church that the Czarist a treaty with the Ottomans, which basically granted the Syriac Orthodox Christians of Syria the protection of the czars of Russia. So, the idea is that since France was always viewed as the natural protector of the Catholics of the middle East…
THOMAS:
Like the Maronites in Lebanon…
AIMEN:
Exactly. It’s the same thing there. That the Russians are tasked since hundreds of years with the protection of the Orthodox Christians in Syria.
THOMAS:
Now for the listener, from well before the Russian Revolution made the Soviet Union an atheist state, Russia was the biggest Orthodox country. And as such it considered itself the protector of the Orthodox Christians of the Middle East. In the 18th century in fact, the Czarina, the Empress of Russia, Catherine the Great, who was in fact a German not a Russian, but she took to it like a duck takes to water, she was the first one to explicitly say that she was going to protect the Orthodox Christians of the Middle East. She had this idea and it, and a lot of Russians did at the time, that eventually the czar of Moscow, heir to the ancient Roman and Byzantines emperors would conquer Istanbul, Constantinople, and become the great leaders of the entire Middle East. Of the entire formerly Christian world. In fact, Catherine the great named her grandson, Constantine, the founder of Constantinople with this ambition in mind. Now, in January 2020 Vladimir Putin visited Syria. We all know the Russians are in Syria. The Russians are allied very closely with Bashar Al-Assad. But when he visited Damascus in January, he went along with the Orthodox Archbishop of the city, the Patriarch of Antioch, to the cathedral of the city, the Orthodox cathedral, to worship there alongside Bashar Al-Assad.
AIMEN:
Well… As you know, the czars of Russia has always been tasked with the protection of the Orthodox Christians of the Middle East. That's the first thing. The second thing is that Qasem Soleimani has just been killed. He is the major competitor to Russia's ambitions in Syria because he represents Iran's interests in Syria. He's dead - perfect. Putin is there to consolidate.
THOMAS:
Well, it's interesting. I was in Syria… I lived in Damascus in 2007, 2008.
AIMEN:
Lucky you. [Laughs]
THOMAS:
And I used to worship at that cathedral. I remember specifically, I'll never forget a Psalm Sunday, you know the Sunday before Easter…
AIMEN:
Yeah.
THOMAS:
…at the cathedral. You know, Arab Christians are a wonderful people… Quite bourgeois, very middle-class, but also slightly chaotic. So, I remember just at the end of the mass, outside of the cathedral an enormous ruckus began. A sort of din of brass band music. Because all of the young Christians of the old city of Damascus had organized themselves into a brass band. And then they spent the next several hours just wandering around the city playing this sort of brass marching music. It was very strange, but it was a tremendous sign of the depth of Orthodox Christian penetration in an old Middle Eastern city like Syria which, which we often forget about.
AIMEN:
Exactly that they predate Islam. We forget basically that they've been there since before the Muslims actually arrived in Damascus.
THOMAS:
And Vladimir Putin considers himself their protector. Clearly he has cultivated very close relations with Orthodox Christian communities in Syria and elsewhere.
AIMEN:
Absolutely.
THOMAS:
But how does that support his wider strategic vision?
AIMEN:
Because then we come to the third issue. You remember we talked about the Chechen war before and how that lasted years and years? Now you remember I talked about the friction between the Sufis and the Salafists in the Chechen war?
THOMAS:
Yeah. You can take it for granted that I remember what you say.
AIMEN:
Yeah. Putin decided that he will split the jihadists from each other. The Sufi jihadists he will court. And he will court them in order to cultivate their enmity against the Salafists to use it to beat the Salafists.
THOMAS:
To divide and conquer?
AIMEN:
Absolutely. So he showered Ramzan Kadyrov and his father before him, Akhmad Kadyrov.
THOMAS:
Who is, who are these Kadyrovs?
AIMEN:
Basically, they are members of a prominent Sufi clan in Chechnya. Uh, they were promised the presidency of Chechnya afterwards within the Russian Federation. And that they will be having the backing of the Kremlin, the backing of the Russian armed forces if they just basically turned their back on the Salafists, the Wahhabis basically, who are trying to ignite a never ending war in the Caucuses against Russia and against other ethnicities in the region.
THOMAS:
So Putin gave the Kadyrov family the control of Chechnya in exchange for turning against the Salafists?
AIMEN:
Exactly. So a war raged between the Kadyrovs and the Salafists, including Shamil Basayev and other people who were the leaders of that Salafist movement along with the successors of Ibn Khattab there. But you know, as the war raged and it claimed actually Kadyrov’s father, Ramzan Kadyrov, his father Akhmad Kadyrov was killed actually by a IED place under his podium by the jihadists. So what happened is: the Arab spring happened. Syria happened. And suddenly Syria became the magnet of jihadism. And what Kadyrov did? He opened the Southern border towards Georgia and allowed all of these people to exit.
THOMAS:
Bye, bye.
AIMEN:
Bye, bye. Go to Syria, wage your jihad there, go establish your califate there. So they went there and then what happened is – when they were all there, between five and 6,000 of them, then this is basically when the Russians thought ‘That's it. We have emptied the Caucuses from them, let us now pound them there.’
THOMAS:
So Russia has been fighting its own enemies in Syria.
AIMEN:
Exactly.
THOMAS:
Why doesn't anyone know about this? That's fascinating.
AIMEN:
Well, you need to be quite intimate with the events as I did when I was in Azerbaijan and Georgia in these days.
THOMAS:
We should all be more intimate with jihadists.
AIMEN:
[Laughs]
THOMAS:
You should create a dating app for jihadists. ‘Get intimate with jihadists’.
AIMEN:
Yeah, except basically I mean, it will entail some sort of slavery contract. [Laughs]
THOMAS:
But let’s get back to this. Russia. And Russia’s role in the formation, or perhaps subversion, of George H. Bush’s New World Order. The economic collapse in Russia that happened at the end of the 90s followed several years where Russia really did dance to the beat of America's drum. Americans insisted on radical economic surgery. The IMF, which along with the World Bank, tries to manage the global economy as it fitfully lurches towards free markets and liberal democracy, and America more or less insist on radical economic and financial surgery to what was a completely sclerotic post-communist economy. And very quickly it caused all sorts of economic problems. The ruble collapsed in value in 1998 I think quite famously, state assets were sold to the highest quote unquote bidder but actually that meant…
AIMEN:
The oligarchs…
THOMAS:
Insiders within who had influence within the government there, and most of them actually seem to live just down the street here in London but…
AIMEN:
Indeed.
[Laughter]
THOMAS:
That’s another story. Um. So initially, Russia did dance to the beat of America's drum. ‘98 the ruble collapses and from then on Russia really stops playing along. That decision, to go its own way again, is largely the result of Vladimir Putin who came to power at that time.
THOMAS:
There's obviously a lot more we could have talked about in this extremely complex episode of Conflicted. I mean, 20 years of Russian history is not easy to summarize. We could've gone into greater detail about the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Or we could've talked about the war in Georgia, Russia’s war in Georgia, in 2008. And, of course, the ongoing Ukrainian civil war which we did touch on. But as we’ve seen through the story of Russia’s relationship with Chechnya, America’s strategy toward Russia at the dawn of the New World Order was a bit of a roller-coaster. And it was, once again, jihadists, this time in Chechnya, who played such a huge role in undermining that strategy by creating the conditions for the rise of Vladimir Putin. A man who, you know love him or hate him, began to look around and realize that America’s global ambitions weren’t necessarily in the interests of Russia. In the end in a sort of twist, Putin partnered with the Sufi Muslims of Chechnya and gave them independence of a sort in exchange for becoming his vassals. Which is why we now see Chechen mercenaries in every Middle Eastern hot zone fighting for Russia and ironically enabling Russia to regain its age-old role of protector of Orthodox Christians everywhere. An unexpected dimension of Russia’s power struggle with America in the Middle East. So we see that despite efforts on both America’s and Russia’s parts to forge a new partnership following the collapse of the Soviet Union, that relationship soured over the course of the noughties leading us to where we are now. Russia with a strong foothold in the Middle East. Russia becoming an opposing force to America, definitely not their partners. Russia allied with Muslim warriors of the Caucuses who are in almost every war zone in the region and beyond supporting and projecting Russian power. It was certainly not what George H W Bush had in mind when he first invoked his New World Order.
[THEME MUSIC]
THOMAS:
Conflicted is a Message Head production. It’s produced by Sandra Ferrari and Jake Otajovic. Edited by Sandra Ferrari. Our theme music is by Matt Huxley.
This week we’ve got another book to giveaway to one of our lucky listeners. Our recommended reading for this episode is: ‘A Dirty War. A Russian Reporter In Chechnya’ by Anna… let’s see if I can get this right… Politkovskaya. Anna Politkovskaya is a hero among journalists and an early victim of Putin’s crackdown on independent journalism. Assassinated in 2006 for exposing the dark side of the new Russia. In this brutally honest book, Politkovskaya courageously documents the Chechnyan War from the ground. To be in with a chance of winning a copy, join our Facebook group before Wednesday 18th March when we announce the winner. The link to the group is in the show notes or search ‘Conflicted Podcast Discussion Group’ on Facebook. You can also find the show on social media – Twitter and Facebook at MHConflicted. And if you’re a fan of the show, please subscribe to Conflicted in your podcast app and leave us a rating and a review. It will really help us to spread the word.
You’ve been listening to Conflicted with me, Thomas Small, and my good friend Aimen Dean. See you again in two weeks!