Posted on 09/05/2022 3:12:03 PM PDT by Timber Rattler
Mansur was 13 when Russian soldiers destroyed his village of Samashki during Chechnya's first war for independence against Russia.
Wielding flamethrowers, the Russians burned Mansur's neighbors alive in their homes, threw grenades into basements and executed men. Four years later, a truce disintegrated, and Mansur was back at war. He says he was never the same after.
"Russia ruined everything I had. I grew up with war, and the war shaped me in all respects," Mansur, 40, says matter-of-factly.
Mansur is one of more than 200,000 Chechens who fled to Turkey and Europe throughout the 2000s during a second war between Russian federal forces and fighters in Chechnya, a republic in far southern Russia.
Leaving his home didn't mean giving up on his fight against Russia. "If I had been born in America or Canada, I wouldn't come here to Ukraine. But because Russia took everything from me, I have to resist. Nothing else matters," Mansur says.
Today, Mansur is the deputy commander of the Sheikh Mansur Battalion (no relation), one of at least two all-Chechen battalions fighting in Ukraine against Russia. These Chechens are among the 20,000 foreign fighters that the Ukrainian government estimated to have joined its forces as of early March, near the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
Extremely common. Britain took and held half of whats now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, plus Egypt, Sudan, Iraq, and etc and etc using Muslim troops, fighting other Muslims.
And for that matter so did France, for its part, in its empire.
__”Or, uh, you might want to sort out your arguments here.”
You might want to note I said “defense has the advantage”.
It is not decisive, same as a coin toss in football, but I suspect you already knew that much.
And did not refute the posted Clausewitz quote.
“Having thus defined the true meaning of the defensive, having defined its boundaries, we return again to the assertion that the defensive is the stronger form of making war.”
Clausewitz
But as I noted, it is extremely common for defenses to be overcome. Clausewitz noted a problem. Much of the art of war consists of finding solutions to this problem.
Maybe the Ukrainians have found solutions to their immediate problem, maybe not. But one cannot simply state that they will lose because they have to attack.
But in those days there was not the great animosity between Christians and muzzies. There were no jihadist wars as there are now. There was no Taliban and ISIS. The Jewish state was not even created(which is the major cause of the friction between Christian and Muslim.
Muslims vs Christians goes back way before the 1900s.
It was different, certainly. Those were the latter days of the great European empires, which were mostly won, defended and policed by native troops. And, of course, when there were very few muslims living in the European home countries. And when the natives had little access to the European mass media technologies and etc.
But even so there were the same religious fanatics popping up on a regular basis calling the tribes to jihad, using the same arguments and rhetoric as we are so familiar with today. The British always had some “mad mullah” somewhere to deal with, from the Mahdi of Sudan to the Ikhwan of Arabia to the Mad Mullah of Swat. It was always something.
Buryats can whip these dumb Muslim thugs any day of the week.
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