According to the following, the Russians are sending in fighters on BOTH sides.
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From Aug 23, 2015:
"a recent investigation conducted by Novaya Gazeta, one of the few independent newspapers left in Russia, complicates this cozy tale of counterterrorist cooperation. Based on extensive fieldwork in one village in the North Caucasus, reporter Elena Milashina has concluded that the “Russian special services have controlled” the flow of jihadists into Syria, where they have lately joined up not only with ISIS but other radical Islamist factions.
In other words, Russian officials are adding to the ranks of terrorists which the Russian government has deemed a collective threat to the security and longevity of its dictatorial ally on the Mediterranean, Bashar al-Assad."
Sheep in the pen...
Why waste a good beatdown and have to start again...
Encircle them and then collapse the ring,no way out...
Well dead, but not alive...
They have No Use for them except as an excuse to go there and as a bonus eliminate the little peckers
Not sure if this reporter is telling the truth... Would seem counterintuitive to send your troops to both sides to war against each other. Infiltrate their territory yes, fight against your own country, no. I doubt anyone is telling the truth anyway.
Your pro-ISIS propaganda cracks me up!
Get out of here.
You have posted this same article cite in two threads now, with a very misleading excerpt from what is a very long, involved and detailed article. While it is “technically correct” that certain elements of the Russian FSB seem to have been facilitating a “pipeline” to funnel jihadis out of Russia into Syria, your spin that they’ve done this because Putin actually supports ISIS is not an accurate depiction of the sense of the article.
I won’t go so far as to accuse you of dishonesty - merely that you failed to fully comprehend the article’s point. Others who bother to read the full article will have to make their own judgment. It’s a very good investigative piece, and I recommend they do.
The bottom line is that the Russians’ reasons for doing this appear to have been mainly to divert their Chechen jihadis from committing terrorist activities in Russia, and thus lessen their domestic problems, while simultaneously dumping them on the US and its allies. In other words, a “pressure relief valve” type of policy. Better to bleed us and let us expend our resources fighting them while saving their own.
In fact, as the article states, there is no proof that this policy, while it may be short-sighted and ultimately stupid, with negative blow-back on Russia, actually originated with Putin. Some of the reporter’s sources attribute it to local/regional FSB officials as a way of using the resulting drop in domestic terrorist activity in Russia in their areas as a way of burnishing their own departmental terrorist/crime-fighting statistics and furthering their own careers. Also, as the article points out, this type of “exporting” problems problems has been a long-standing policy meme of Russian governments since Czarist times.
Now that Putin has decided to directly intervene militarily in Syria, we’ll have an opportunity to see if his forces start killing ISIS directly as well. That will be the determinant as to whether Putin actually “supports” ISIS, or has merely been using them as a tool or pawn to weaken the West and advance his global agenda.
The Soviets had a pattern of promoting terrorists all over the world to bleed the US and destabilize governments friendly to us. To say or even imply, however, that Putin supports ISIS, and by extension their Islamist agenda, is not the conclusion of this article.
I’m guessing coordination requires the rank and file ISIS not run to the hills... nonetheless, an interesting perspective.