Russia’s View of ISIS – Excerpts from PRAVDA

“Islamic State is not just a threat to the West, it is a threat to Humankind…. Handle IS like you handle a snake. President Barack Obama recently warned against exaggerating the threat posed by Islamic State. This is a mistake. Islamic State may be on the defensive in Iraq and Syria but it has just abducted 91 Syrian Christians and in the last year has murdered over ten thousand civilians, as it proceeds to commit ethnic and religious cleansing. Islamic State is also taking advantage of the chaos in Libya and is today opening fronts in other regions. Next stop, Pakistan. Islamic State has perpetrated massacres of men, women and children as it destroys whole communities which are not Sunni Moslem in Iraq and Syria - the Turkmen, Shabaks, Christians, Yezidi, Sabaeans, Kaka'e, Faili Kurds, Shi'a. Nine months after Islamic State marched into the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, the massacres continue. The UN High Commission for Human Rights claims that the outrages may amount to counts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity…. Suppose Islamic State showed in its recruitment videos what it really does, so instead of showing young men running along a beach and then sitting looking defiantly at the camera with stupid expressions on their faces as their leader screams diatribes aimed at engendering hatred through evoking some imagined shared experience, why doesn't Islamic State show videos of its foot soldiers shooting a woman in the head because she was wearing a red jacket, why doesn't Islamic State show video footage of the boys it murdered because they were not Sunni Moslems, why does Islamic State not show its "Jihadis" raping Yazidi girls or forcing nine-year-olds to have sex with them? …Murdering and raping children is Satanic…. The way to handle Islamic State is to treat it like a snake: ensnare the head.” Above from Timofei Belov’s February 25th PRAVDA article “Handling Islamic State” - http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/25-02-2015/129896-islamic_state-0/ “The head of the Center for Strategic Studies "Russia - the Islamic World", writer and publicist Shamil Sultanov, spoke about the origins and organization of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in an interview with Pravda.Ru: “The Islamic State is a very complex phenomenon. There were intelligence services from at least four other countries: Syria, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States that took part in its creation…. The Americans may create a coalition of 15-20 countries and they will defeat them, albeit temporarily.

"As a result of air strikes, it is impossible to win absolute victory. They will go up to the mountains, and a long guerrilla war will start. The idea has been planted. This is the idea to return to the Islamic State, the Caliphate, which carries a certain meaning, which the modern world does not have…. the time of world revolution is drawing near. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates call themselves the Islamic State, but then suddenly a fundamentalist Islamic State appears that is directed primarily against them. ISIS has about 10,000 Saudis - they are fundamentalist jihadists from Saudi Arabia. They already say that their prime goal is to topple the rotten and corrupt regime in Saudi Arabia. Ultimately, we are entering a very interesting period. This is not a geopolitical or a global economic period - this is an ideological period. Once again, we are entering the period of ideological wars. Religious wars are one of the most acute forms of ideological war. Ideological wars always last till the end.” Above quotes from Yuri Kondratyev’s September 23rd PRAVDA article “ISIS starts new era in the history of mankind” - http://english.pravda.ru/society/stories/23-09-2014/128592-isis-0/

“In a statement to the Japanese government in January 2015, shortly before the execution of two Japanese hostages, ISIS leaders said: “we, by Allah's grace, are an Islamic Caliphate with authority and power, an entire army thirsty for your blood." Why make new enemies? Japan wasn’t likely to get involved in fighting ISIS. PRAVDA notes some ideas on ISIS:

“propaganda; the group's "horrific" utilization of social media and the violent videos that they spread have specific and easily predictable objectives: 1- spread anxiety and fear among the enemy population in order to disrupt everyday life activities (psychological warfare) 2- pressure the political decision makers to take certain steps 3- attract criminals and extremists from around the globe in order to expand their ranks 4- earn a reputation not only as major worldwide Jihadist organization but also as the first real "Islamic State", in opposition to other Muslim countries accused of not following the real doctrine of Islam. 5- it is also possible that ISIS is trying to create a clash between Muslims and non-Muslims in Europe and that is done by trying to spread attacks on "enemy territory" in order to pressure European institutions to take steps that can be perceived as anti-Islamic and by increasing the hatred against Muslims among Europeans.” The suggestion being, that in creating more foreign enemies, ISIS may unify broader internal support from the Muslim world. “Russia is an interesting case when dealing with ISIS and other jihadist organizations:

in the summer of 2014 Umar al-Shishani (Tarkhan Batirashvili) had made a phone call to his father in Georgia, days after the jihadists had conquered Mosul and said that Russia would be next: "He said 'don't worry dad, I'll come home and show the Russians.........I have many thousands following me now and I'll get more. We'll have our revenge against Russia." In a videotaped message to Russian President Vladimir Putin posted on the internet in September 2014, ISIS members linked to al-Shishani's group threatened to infiltrate and wage war on the North Caucasus: "We will, with the consent of Allah, free Chechnya and all of the Caucasus! The Islamic State is here and will stay here, and it will spread with the grace of Allah" terrorists said in the video. The next thing we know is that in November 2014 Umar al-Shishani was mysteriously killed and as Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov wrote on Instagram alongside a photograph of the supposedly dead militant: "Tarkhan Batirashvili, the enemy of Islam who called himself Omar al-Shishani, has been killed. [The same fate belies] anyone who even thinks about threatening Russia and the Chechen people". In January 2015 an execution video released by ISIS showed a small boy being handed a semi-automatic pistol by a bearded militant and executing two men (Russian spies according to ISIS). The bearded terrorist, identified as a Caucasian known by the name "Abu Saad al-Daghestani" was killed in Koba a few days later and under mysterious circumstances. Other terror organization individuals became targets of such strategy, such as Dokku Umarov, former leader of the Caucasus Emirate who had threatened the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014 and various other Daghestani jamaat leaders, who were eliminated throughout time. If we want to go back to the Soviet period, we could also recall the case of the assault on the Soviet embassy in Beirut in 1985, when four members of the diplomatic staff (Arkady Katkov, Valery Myrikov, Oleg Spirin, and Nikolai Svirsky) were kidnapped by a jihadist group linked to Hezbollah, unhappy with the Soviet support for Syria-linked militias in Tripoli. Katkov was killed a few days after the abduction as the jihadists wanted to show how serious they were. The Soviets indeed decided to show the jihadists how serious they were and captured a Hezbollah militia man and close relative of a prominent Hezbollah leader. They then castrated him and sent the severed organs to the Hezbollah official, before shooting the militant. In addition to presenting him with this proof of their seriousness, the KGB operatives warned the Hezbollah leader about the fact that they were well aware of the identities of other close relatives of his, and that he could expect more such packages if the three Soviet diplomats were not freed immediately. A few days later the three diplomats were released near the Soviet embassy.” Quoted passages above from Giovanni Gaicolone’s February 2nd PRAVDA article “A Russian response strategy on ISIS” - http://english.pravda.ru/hotspots/terror/02-02-2015/129679-russian_response_isis-0/

I hope these articles give some insight into the Russian’s thoughts ISIS and on dealing with Islamic terrorism. Their pragmatism stands in stark contrast to Obama’s eager appeasement of Iran and his inability to even utter the phrase “Islamic terrorism.” Americans should be asking themselves why President Obama supports the Islamic world to the detriment of the West.

--- contributed by David Montaigne, author of Antichrist 2016-2019: Mystery Babylon, Barack Obama & the Islamic Caliphate