[MarkBsnr]

America has been in bed with Sunni extremists (wahabis from Saudi Arabia) for over 3 decades, while Russia is in bed with Shiite extremists (Iranian-backed). At the end of the day, the two former superpowers are in bed with Islamic extremists of all kinds.

Russia is merely using them as outposts - example Syria - because they don't have the subject countries that they used to. Russia does not give welfare to Muslim terrorists. They buy and sell intelligence and observation posts in foreign countries.

[annalex]

Russia does not give welfare to Muslim terrorists.

That very much depends on what you call "welfare". Putin certainly feeds those in the North Caucasus who are friendly to his regime: they voted for him at the rate of, like, 99% (across Russia it was more like 60% counting fraud). Grozny, the capital of Chechnya now sports a huge mosque and generally was transformed into a prosperous glistening city on the federal ruble. Russian nationalists in the meanwhile have had the slogan "Enough with the feeding of the Caucasus!" for years, and got jail terms for that. Generally, the petroruble is mostly spent on the Muslim periphery. Will it buy anyone security, remains to be seen; the last mass-scale terror attack in Russia was in February (three killed, 6 wounded, one missing). However, the rate is far better than in 2012, so they must be doing something right (ru.wikipedia.org

Grozny at night



"Enough Feeding the Caucasus"
(observe Russian Imperial flags)