Kavkaz

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.

Ingush Mujahideen attacked a FSB building and the puppet “administration of the President” in the Ingushetia’s capital Magas last night, Russian sources reported.

For every Chechen male, the building of a house is part of his task in life, on a par with having a large family and raising children, so that he need not be ashamed of them in front of others. For many it is at the very least a lifetime’s work.

Immediately after yesterday’s announcement of the rulings by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg in two Chechnya-related cases, press conferences were held in the Russian and Chechen capitals by representatives of the Memorial Human Rights Centre, who gave their assessment of the event.

Human rights activist Tatyana Lokshina, who has recently visited the occupied Chechnya, told to the “Caucasus Knot” journalists that more 300 young men joined Chechen Mujahideen.