Tag Archives: Russia

How Russia Manipulates Islamic Terrorism

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on September 8, 2015

Shamil Basayev and Murad Margoshvili (a.k.a. Muslem al-Shishani)

Shamil Basayev and Murad Margoshvili (a.k.a. Muslem a-Shishani)

Last year I wrote about the murky role Russia was playing in the Syrian war, bolstering the Bashar al-Assad tyranny while facilitating the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) and other Salafi-jihadists as a means of dividing and discrediting the Syrian opposition. This strategy and the associated tactics—infiltrating the insurgency, facilitating the arrival of al-Qaeda and other global jihadists to displace the nationalists, and in general driving the rebellion into the political dead-end of extremism and barbaric atrocities—has worked in other States where the intelligence services were trained by Moscow, and it worked internally to defeat the separatist movement in Chechnya. In Syria, Russia is reinforcing an old client regime, which has staked its life on the proposition that it is the last line of defence against a terrorist takeover and a genocide against the minorities, a policy now largely directed on-the-ground by Iran, to whom Assad surrendered sovereignty some time ago. New evidence has emerged to underline these points. Continue reading →

Everyone Who Questions Russia’s Story About the 1999 Apartment Bombings Dies

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on September 6, 2015

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A Response to Criticism: Why the Ex-Saddamists in the Islamic State Matter

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on August 10, 2015

Abu Ayyub al-Masri and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi: ISIS's co-leaders, 2006-10

Abu Ayyub al-Masri and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi: ISIS’s co-leaders, 2006-10

In the Jerusalem Post on Sunday, Seth Frantzman wrote in opposition to the idea that the ex-military-intelligence officials of the Saddam Hussein regime had contributed significantly to the success of the Islamic State (ISIS) in taking over large swathes of Syria and Iraq. Much of what Frantzman says, about the overestimation of ISIS and Iran’s growing Imperium pushing Sunnis into ISIS’s camp, is unarguable, but he is in error about the time-frame of the ex-Saddamists’ migration into ISIS and underestimates their impact. Continue reading →

Obituary: Robert Conquest

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on August 5, 2015

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Few men did more than the historian Robert Conquest to refute the lies of the Soviet Union, undermining its ideology and propaganda, therefore its appeal, and ultimately its regime. Indeed, at the final meeting of the Soviet Central Committee a Stalinist hack described Conquest as “anti-Sovietchik No. 1“; a compliment if ever there was one. Continue reading →

Russia’s Secret Police

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on August 1, 20151

Charles Ruud’s and Sergei Stepanov’s Fontanka 16: The Tsar’s Secret Police traces the evolution of political policing in Russia, focusing on the Okhranka, the final incarnation of the secret police before the Russian Revolution in 1917, and along the way puts paid to a whole array of myths about the pre-Bolshevik Russian government, especially as regards the Jewish Question.

The growth of the Russian political police occurred in four major stages. The first phase lasted from the founding of the Russian State by Ivan the Terrible (1533-84) after the expulsion of the Tatars to the opening of the “Third Section” in 1826 as a reaction to the Decembrist revolt the previous year—the first time the Imperial State security services were housed at Fontanka 16 in St. Petersburg—which intended to (and succeeded in, as 1848 would demonstrate) extirpate the liberal spirit that challenged the autocracy. The third phase saw the Third Section become the Department of Police at the onset of a crackdown after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, who had enacted broad liberal reforms on censorship and serfdom. The elite secret police force grew out of the palace guard, becoming known as the Okhranka (though this is more usually rendered in English as Okhrana). The final phase began in 1906, after the 1905 revolution, when the Okhranka worked to stop a liberal-radical coalition building. Continue reading →

The Iran Deal: More Terrorism And An Eventual Bomb—And That’s If It Holds

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on July 17, 2015

Published at The Independent

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With all the leaks and the numerous “interim” deals, the nuclear deal—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—made with Iran on July 14 contained few surprises. The deal makes Iran a threshold nuclear-weapons regime for its duration and smooths the path to an overt nuclear-weapons capacity afterward. In the meantime, it has given Iran extra resources for the export of terrorism. And that’s just if Iran keeps the deal. Continue reading →

Saddam and the Taliban

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on June 29, 2015

Alleged photograph of Mullah Omar. Other photos are very rare

Alleged photograph of Mullah Omar. Other photos are very rare

In examining the Saddam Hussein regime’s long relationship with al-Qaeda, a noticeable sub-theme is the connections the Saddam regime had with the Taliban theocracy in Afghanistan. The evidence accumulated suggests that Saddam’s policies in his later years, namely the Islamization of his own regime and instrumentalization of Islamists in foreign policy, included welcoming relations with the Taliban. Continue reading →

Book Review: A Shameful Act (2006) by Taner Akcam

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on June 9, 2015

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This is the complete review. It has previously been posted in three parts: Part 1 on the question of whether the 1915-16 Armenian massacres constitute genocide; Part 2 on the post-war trials and the Nationalist Movement; and Part 3 gives some conclusions on what went wrong in the Allied efforts to prosecute the war criminals and the implications for the present time, with Turkey’s ongoing denial that genocide took place and the exodus of Christians from the Middle East.

A Question of Genocide

The controversy over the 1915-16 massacres of Armenian Christians in the Ottoman Empire is whether those acts constitute genocide. Those who say they don’t are not the equivalent of Holocaust-deniers in that they do not deny that the massacres happened; what they deny is that the massacres reach the legal definition of genocide. Their case is based on three interlinked arguments:

  • Unlike the Nazi Holocaust where a defenceless population was murdered only for its identity, the Armenians were engaged in a massive armed revolt, and this is why the Ottoman government decided to deport them.
  • The intent of the Ottomans was not massacre but the removal of the Armenians, who had sided with one foreign invading power (Russia) and who were showing signs of collaborating with another (Britain), from the militarily sensitive areas as Turkey suffered a two-front invasion in early 1915.
  • While terrible massacres of Armenians, plus starvation and the cold, took maybe a million lives during the deportations—the numbers are very uncertain, again unlike the Holocaust—when the Armenians reached their destinations in Syria and Iraq, which were also part of the Ottoman Empire, they were well-treated and allowed to rebuild their lives, which would not have been the case had the Ottomans intended their destruction.

Taner Akcam’s A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility presents evidence to undermine every one of these arguments. Continue reading →

Bernard Lewis and the Armenian Genocide Question

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on June 7, 2015

In 2012, Bernard Lewis published his memoirs, Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian, which included a chapter on the court case brought against him in France in the 1990s for refusing to agree that the massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915-16 constitute genocide in the original sense of the term, as applied to the Nazi Holocaust of European Jewry. The chapter is reproduced below.

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Book Review: A Shameful Act (2006) by Taner Akcam, Part 2

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on June 4, 2015

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Part 1 of this review dealt with the question of whether the 1915-16 Armenian massacres constitute genocide. This part is about the post-war trials and the Nationalist Movement. Part 3 gives some conclusions on what went wrong in the Allied efforts to prosecute the war criminals and the implications for the present time. Alternatively, the complete review is available here.

The First Phase of the Trials

On October 30, 1918, the Ottoman Empire signed its final treaty of defeat. The Ottomans’ long decline began in 1683, and by 1844—not the 1830s, as Akcam slightly strangely says—the Empire was referred to as the “sick man of Europe”. The armistice was a near-total surrender, allowing the occupation of any area the Allies deemed necessary for their security. Unfortunately, it was neither the end of the war nor the end of the massacres against the Armenians.

The Allies—Britain, France, and Russia—issued a declaration on May 24, 1915, saying:

In light of the crimes against humanity and civilisation committed by Turkey, the allied powers warn the Sublime Porte that members of the Ottoman government involved in the mass murder will be held personally responsible for these crimes.

Not coincidentally, Akcam remarks, within days of this the official deportation law was passed through the Ottoman Parliament and would thereafter be issued by the Interior Ministry as legal cover for the CUP’s actions. The Allied statement was a first introduction of the concept of crimes against humanity, and of individual responsibility that extended to senior Generals and Heads of State. The Russians fell to the Communists and for reasons of realpolitik the French and Italians soon dropped their demands for punishing the Turkish war criminals, but the British were relentless. Continue reading →