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thedrifter
09-11-04, 07:32 AM
09-10-2004

Terrorism Still Leads Back to Moscow



By Jim Simpson



The tragedy in Beslan has been called the worst terrorist event since 9/11. So Russia has finally been drawn inexorably into the global war on terror in a most dramatic and horrible way. What kind of animals could do such things to children? It is absolutely unprecedented.



Or is it?



As Ralph Peters wrote in The New York Post this week, “While the world watched the Beslan tragedy, other terrorist barbarities went virtually ignored. We’ve become so tolerant of Islamist atrocities that it takes hundreds of dead children to get our attention .… In Afghanistan, Taliban remnants bombed a rural schoolhouse .… In Iraq, the situation is crueler still.”



The terrorists of 9/11 were completely indifferent as to who their victims were. There were children on those planes too. The Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan have deliberately targeted hospitals and schools in their continuing campaign of terror. The Iraqi insurgents do the same thing.



But before anyone ever heard of al Qaeda, the PLO was merrily blowing up women and children, not to mention putting their own young boys and girls in harm’s way to do their dirty work. Absolutely despicable!



During the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese Communists targeted women and children if they thought it would serve their purposes, including using them as human bombs – willingly or not. Sierra Leone’s “RUF” insurgents hacked off children’s limbs with wanton abandon. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the Soviets institutionalized the targeting of children with their infamous “Doll Bomb” campaign.



Doll Bombs!



The consequences of this barbaric policy, prosecuted with the knowledge and blessing of our favorite Prince of Peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, can be witnessed today in the thousands, that’s thousands of now grown men and women with missing arms, legs, eyes and bearing other horrible scars still wandering around the Afghan countryside. We will never know how many died. This was a deliberate Soviet military tactic.



Wanton, blatant mass murder of men, women and children during both war and peace is the one enduring legacy of the world communist movement.



And now it has been conclusively revealed in a new book by journalist Bill Gertz, Treachery: How America’s Friends and Foes Are Secretly Arming Our Enemies, that Russia (and France and Germany for that matter) were secretly arming and assisting Iraqis fighting our forces even after we invaded in 2003.



This is not really news. During Gulf War I, Russia had advisers on the ground in Iraq throughout the war and snippets of news appeared here and there during the first phase of Iraqi Freedom making the same case. Terror was one of the Soviet Union’s main exports for decades and apparently, given their support of regimes like Saddam’s Iraq, it still is.



This unsavory aspect of Russian and its precursor Soviet government’s devious activity is an indisputable fact. Yet world leaders’ denial of this fact is nothing short of mass self-delusion.



The Soviet Union (excuse me, “Russia”) has been the largest single terrorist-supporting nation in the world almost since the Bolsheviks overthrew Russia’s first-ever democratically elected government in 1917 – not to mention the horror they visited on their own people. Through their own efforts and those of surrogates in Cuba, Syria, Iraq, China, North Korea and other places, Russia’s Soviets were fundamentally responsible for the birth of terrorism as a widespread tactic of warfare in the 20th century.



While the recent wave of Islamofascist terrorism currently staining the globe may not have its roots in the Soviet terror training camps, they have nonetheless taken their tactics directly from the page books of Soviet doctrine. Furthermore, much of their ordnance and training continues to come, directly or indirectly, from communist countries. While Chechens prosecute a guerilla war against Russia, and Osama Bin Laden brands both communists and capitalists as infidels, there remains an undeniable nexus between the Islamofascists and support from current and former communist regimes.



Russia provides aid of all varieties to Iran, which in turn supports Shia insurgents in Iraq, al Qaeda, Hezbollah and for that matter, practically every Islamic terrorist group in operation today. China and North Korea, for their part continue to provide arms and aid to many of the same.



Am I trying to say the Russians deserved what they got? Hardly. The deaths in Beslan are an unconscionable atrocity made more so by the deliberate targeting of children. My heart goes out to them one and all. But because of the Soviets’ (and Russia’s) longstanding promotion of international terrorism, the children of Beslan are as much victims of their own government as they are of the terrorists.



In fact, the Russian government has so much blood on its hands, a real cynic might even conclude that they had something to do with the attack. An article in Novye Izvestia quoted in an AP report by Jim Heintz queried: “Why the law-enforcement bodies didn’t know and why they allowed a column of fighters to get into the city past all checkpoints – this is something that can only be judged by rumors.” All of the approximately 30 terrorists reportedly arrived in a single military style truck. An article in The Washington Times on Tuesday reported that the group was able to pack the school with explosives over the course of the summer, right under the noses of a police station a mere 200 yards away.



An independent online Russian newspaper, Kommersant, reported further that some of the terrorists implicated in the bombing were supposed to have been behind bars when the attack occurred, but there they were at the school. “ ‘We were all sure [accused terrorists] Kulaev and Shaybekhanov were behind bars, because they had been detained,’ stated Deputy Commander of Chechen OMON Buvadi Dakhaev. Residents of Engenoy, the home village of Kulaev and Shaybekhanov were also astonished: ‘How could they be in Beslan if they are in prison?’ they wondered.”



I don’t know what the Russians would hope to gain by such a gruesome intrigue. Maybe this gives them the pretext they need to obliterate the Chechen rebels. While I don’t put anything beneath the Russian security services (remember these are all old KGB hands), it remains difficult for me to swallow that they would willingly allow such barbarity against their own children.



So perhaps now that they have been hit at home in the most awful way imaginable, they might start to rethink their almost century-long tradition of arming, training and funding international terrorist scumbags. They could start by helping us identify and locate the insurgents operating in Iraq. There is little doubt, in my mind at least, that they know who and where they are. Maybe that way, they could start to pay back their horrendous blood debt to society by saving a few young American lives.



On Tuesday, Russian General Yuri Baluyevsky was quoted as saying: “As for carrying out preventive strikes against terrorist bases, we will take all measures to liquidate terrorist bases in any region of the world.” Well, the Russians shouldn’t have too much trouble finding them, for the record clearly shows that they put a great number of them there in the first place.



Jim Simpson is a Contributing Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at

one.wonders@verizon.net. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com.

http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=DefenseWatch.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=628&rnd=779.9601035814693


Ellie