Kavkaz

Russian President Vladimir Putin is to visit Iran on October 16 to attend the summit of the Caspian Sea littoral states, Iran‘s Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said here on Tuesday evening.

The United States and Azerbaijan today signed an agreement to conduct a feasibility study on building two pipelines under the Caspian Sea. Under the agreement, the U.S. Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) will give Azerbaijan’s State Oil Company a $1.7 million grant to conduct the study.

Dozens of civilians are reported to have been killed in air raids by Western occupation forces in the Afghan southern province of Helmand.

Mujahideen eliminated a so-called deputy head of the “Buinaksk department of interior affairs” Lieut. Col. Abdulmashid Rasulov.

Barack Obama, the US presidential candidate, has said he would be prepared to attack al-Qaeda targets inside Pakistan without Islamabad’s approval.

On July 30 the Kavkaz Center website posted a new statement from Doku Umarov, leader of the Chechen rebels and the North Caucasus insurgency. Umarov declared, “We [the Mujahideen] are ready for any kind of big event. Many ask when a large-scale attack will be.

According to the source inside the Staff of Eastern Front of CRI Armed Forces, in early July up to 40 armed Kadyrovans fled to the mountains to the Mujahideen. According to the source, former Kadyrovans were taken to the special quarantine base in the mountains of Chechnya.

Relatives of the more than 330 victims of the Beslan school siege have released a video that they say proves Russian security forces caused the massacre by firing grenades on the besieged building.

Even by Russian standards, the Litvinenko affair has been exceptionally murky. But, paradoxically, it has also been marked by a heightened sense of mirror-image symmetry. Either President Vladimir Putin is the villain or anti-Putin tycoon Boris Berezovsky is; Andrei Lugovoi was either the killer or himself a victim.

Up to eight million Iraqis require immediate emergency aid, with nearly half of the population living in “absolute poverty”, according to a report by Oxfam and a coalition of Iraqi groups.