Long way to Liberty Island

According to intelligence services, Russians joined the ranks of the Taliban out of conviction

The list of Russians who fought in Afghanistan on the side of the Taliban and are now in custody at the American Guantanamo Bay base was announced yesterday by representatives of the Prosecutor General's Office for the Southern Federal District. These are 30-year-old resident of Tatarstan Almaz Sharipov, 40-year-old Ufa resident Ravil Gumarov and 20-year-old native of Kabardino-Balkaria Rasul Kudaev. Neither in Russia nor in Afghanistan did these people encounter each other, but they still had something in common. At different times, they became interested in the radical trends of Islam, began attending madrassas, and in 2001 they went to jihad (war against infidels) in Afghanistan.

Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov was the first to announce that there are three Russians among the more than 250 Guantanamo prisoners. The Office of the Prosecutor General for the Southern Federal District confirmed this fact yesterday, saying that it had already opened a criminal case against Russian citizens captured by the Americans under two articles of the Criminal Code - 322 (illegal crossing of the state border) and 359 (mercenarism). According to investigators, in mid-March they, together with FSB officers, came to Guantanamo, where they had a long and detailed conversation with the arrested trio and photographed the captives. The last procedure was necessary in order to finally make sure that the Russians gave their real names and really are Sharipov, Gumarov and Kudaev. Officially, the procedure for identifying the detainees has not yet been completed, and the Prosecutor General’s Office has not yet provided additional information about them. However, the correspondent of the newspaper “Vremya Novostei” became aware of some details from the life of the newly-minted Taliban. At least those that they themselves reported during interrogations and that are currently known to the intelligence services.

20-year-old Rasul Kudaev, as it turned out, is well known both in the FSB Directorate of Kabardino-Balkaria and in the North Caucasus RUBOP, primarily as a member of one of the local jammats - Wahhabi communities. He was not directly involved in the sensational organization “Muslim Society No. 3,” which was preparing coups in Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachay-Cherkessia, but, as operatives note, he was close to some of its activists. At the same time, according to available data, Rasul Kudaev is a relative of one of the major officials of the republic.

Sharipov and Gumarov did not come to the attention of the special services until the latest events. At least in the databases of the FSB Directorate of Tatarstan and Bashkiria, they are not among the registered Wahhabis. Although operatives do not rule out that both could have had contacts with a large group of militants arrested on the territory of the two republics back in 2000. It was composed mainly of students from the Yoldyz madrasah located in Naberezhnye Chelny (Sharipov lived in this city), who later organized a series of terrorist attacks on gas pipelines.

Now the special services already know for sure that Sharipov, Gumarov and Kudaev did not communicate with each other in Russia, and each of them came to Afghanistan separately, but in similar ways. At some point in their lives, they all began to attend the mosque, but then traditional Islam ceased to suit them. Then the men went to the nearest madrasahs, where Wahhabism was professed by foreign preachers. “Pumped up” by such instructions, Sharipov, Gumarov and Kudaev began to look for a reason to participate in the “war against the infidels,” however, as the “teachers” explained to them, jihad in Chechnya was already fading and they had to wait for a new one. This is exactly what Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Omar announced in the fall of 2001, and at the same time Sharipov, Gumarov and Kudaev illegally went to Afghanistan. They were detained by the Americans, according to Russian intelligence services, at different times with weapons in their hands.

Alexander SHVAREV