Clamping a total media blackout to cover up their atrocities and violations has been the policy of the Russians in their second war against the Chechen freedom fighters since 1999. The feverish Russian propaganda to label their brutalities a war on terrorism and the Chechen freedom fighters international terrorists has succeeded in influencing not only the Western media but a section of the Arab media as well. The Russians found in the Afghanistan war following the 9/11 and in the Iraq war a golden opportunity to project the Chechens as enemy fighters.
Since there is a Chechen community settled in Iraq, such propaganda becomes highly misleading. This article aims to put the record straight and to shed some light on the Iraqi-Chechens who formed part of Chechen immigrants to Ottoman Empire in the 19th century.
This article is mainly based on an interview with an Iraqi-Chechen Lt. Gen. Muhammad Abdul Qadir, a former governor of Mosul and a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war. Lt. Gen. Qadir was invited to join the army under Allawi administration, though later government abandoned the move because of his role in the Iraq-Iran war.
Some maintain there are two kinds of Chechen fighters in Iraq. In fact there is only one kind. They, of course, are the second or third generation of the nineteenth century immigrants to the Ottoman Empire. The alleged second kind is the Chechens invented by the so-called “experts on political Islam” such as the Indian writer B. Raman who claimed that there were some non-Arabic speaking people among the fighters in Fallujah. The Indian writer ascribed these fighters’ origin to the nineteenth century Chechen Diaspora in Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The so-called expert do not know that there were no Chechen immigrants in Saudi Arabia while the community in Jordan was just a 8000-strong conservative group.
In yet another article, Raman links the increasing incidence of suicide operations in Iraq to Chechen fighters as though it was a Chechen specialization. In both the articles Raman attributes his information to some unknown sources. The writer also insinuates that the US intelligence capability is weak with no idea of actual strength of the enemies in Iraq. The two articles, apparently, strengthen the impression that the writer is yet another one of the ilk of “the pseudo experts on political Islam” that began to mushroom in the wake of the 11/9 attacks.
Yet Debka Files website, invents a link between the ethnic Chechens and the Iraq war on the basis of a reported statement by Abu Al-Waleed Al-Ghamdi, then commander of the Arab fighters in Chechnya that some fighters in Chechnya planned to go to Iraq. In fact the commander did not say the fighters he referred to were ethnic Chechens. Al-Ghamdi is only a commander of the Arab fighters in Chechnya and obviously he was speaking of the Arab volunteers in Chechnya.
The Time Magazine quoted a French terrorism expert Ronald Jacquard as saying that between 1500 and 2000 Chechen fighters were preparing to leave for Iraq, according to a Pravda report. The Christian Science Monitor quoted some American soldiers as saying that two Chechen snipers had killed 15 Americans. But these are claims unsubstantiated by any kind of evidence. They did not explain how they came to the conclusion that they were ethnic Chechens. On the other hand the Pentagon or the State Department has neither confirmed nor denied the presence of Chechen fighters in Iraq. The US Central Command in Iraq also has not confirmed any Chechen presence in the war-torn country. It is also to be noted that Iraq’s Ambassador to Moscow Abdul Halim Hashim Mustafa has dismissed all talk of any Chechen presence among Iraqi insurgents.
Most of the Chechens in Iraq are the second generation of the nineteenth century immigrants who settled in various parts of the Ottoman Empire such as Turkey, Jordan, Syria and Iraq. The people settled in Iraq’s northern towns Al-Nasr, Tikrit and Al-Hawayja were mostly of the Arastakhwi tribe in Ingushetia.
Some later batches went to Mosul and onward to Dayali and Baghdad whose total number were not more than 2000. After leaving behind their native farmlands, most of the immigrants had to adopt military career for their livelihood. Unlike their kinsmen settled in the neighboring Jordan, the Iraqi Chechens lost their separate identity under the prevailing social system dominated by the Baathist nationalist ideology.
Efforts are, however, under way to rejuvenate the defunct community organizations and language teaching establishments. It is with this aim that the Chechen Ingushetia society was established in Kirkuk after the fall of the Saddam regime.
The media blackout by the Russian forces since the break out of the second Chechen war in 1995 also gave Moscow’s propaganda machinery a golden opportunity to paint its brutal oppression of the freedom struggle as a war against terror. This in turn prompted not only the Western press but some of the Arab media as well to depict the Chechen struggle as international terrorism. The Russian efforts to denigrate the Chechens have succeeded in some other ways too. For example some literary works depict Chechen characters as criminals and terrorists. The same propaganda might have been the reason why a squalid and lawless district in Sadr City has been called after Chechnya.