| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Three suspects in Tatarstan cleric attacks killed |
| 2012-10-25 |
 Three In July, Tatarstan's leading Muslim cleric, Mufti Ildus Faizov, was wounded in a car bombing and his former deputy, Valiulla Yakupov, was gunned down in attacks conducted by suspected Islamists. Two members of the Federal Security Service were killed in the fighting in Kazan along with the three Tatarstan's Interior Ministry said the |
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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia | ||||
| Attacks in Tatarstan kill cleric, injure another | ||||
| 2012-07-22 | ||||
 MOSCOW -- A senior Muslim cleric was killed and another seriously injured in what appeared to be coordinated attacks Thursday in centralRussia's Tatarstan republic.Valiulla Yakupov, the Islamic chief ideologue in the predominantly Muslim region, was shot by gunmen several times about 10 a.m. as he was leaving his home, officials said. The injured cleric managed to make his way to his car parked nearby, where he died, Eduard Abdullin, spokesman for the Tatarstan branch of the Russian Investigative Committee, said in televised remarks. About 15 minutes later, a bomb went off under the car of the region's Islamic leader, Mufti Ildus Faizov, who was injured when he was thrown out of the vehicle by the blast. No group immediately took responsibility for the assaults, which experts noted were similar to attacks in the North Caucasus that claimed the lives of dozens of muftis and imams over the last decade.
Faizov had a narrow escape, as the attackers obviously "counted that he would be in the passenger seat whereas he was in the driver's seat," Abdullin said to Russia-24. Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday that "the culprits will be found, exposed and punished." "This demonstrates just one more time that the situation in our country is far from ideal," said the visibly tense Russian leader as he spoke to a group of officials in televised video. Chechen rebel commander Doku Umarov ordered militants from the Caucasus into central Russia to rouse Muslims to a holy war, the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported Thursday in an analytical piece on the religious situation in Tatarstan.The report said the newcomers prevailed in 10 of the more than 50 mosques in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, which is more than 800 miles northeast of Chechnya.
Yakupov, the slain cleric, "resolutely opposed all kinds of radical movements," said senior Islamic official Rushan Abbyasov, who is based in Moscow.
The confrontation between traditional and radical Islam is getting more intense, said Alexei Malashenko, a senior expert on Islam with the Moscow Carnegie Center, who warned against a hasty crackdown in Tatarstan. "The latest attack -- the way it was implemented -- certainly looks as if the fire from the North Caucasus is coming up here already," Malashenko said in an interview. "But I also have a strong fear that if the state comes out to crack down on such communities in Tatarstan in full force, it may result in a backlash of violence that should be avoided by all means." Another observer said Thursday's attacks may have had nothing to do with radical Islam, which he said is unlikely to dominate in Tatarstan. "Tatarstan Muslim leaders tightly control the holy hajj quotas issued to Tatarstan for Mecca travels, and there is so much money involved in it," said Maxim Shevchenko, a television anchor and expert on Islam. "There are so many powerful organized crime groups in Tatarstan that I wouldn't be surprised that some of them would want to get their cut of it too." | ||||
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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Five arrested in attacks on Muslim leaders in Tatarstan |
| 2012-07-21 |
| Russian officials said they detained five suspects on Friday over attacks that injured the top Islamic official in the Tatarstan region and killed his deputy. The federal Investigative Committee suggested the attacks were provoked by conflicts over faith and money. Tatarstan's mufti, Ildis Faizov, was hospitalized after three powerful explosions hit his car in Tatarstan's capital, Kazan, on Thursday. A little earlier, deputy mufti Valiulla Yakupov was gunned down outside his home. "Investigators believe the main motive was the professional activity of the victims, including their ideological differences with opponents," said a statement by the Investigative Committee. Faizov had taken "a tough position toward organisations that preach radical forms of Islam", it added. "In addition, he took control of the movement of financial resources of the organisation Ideal-Hadzh, which sent Muslims to Mecca, and on this basis a conflict occurred between the mufti and the leader of this organisation, which threatened him." It said the chairman of Ideal-Hadzh, Rustem Gataullin, was one of the detained suspects, as well as the leader of a mosque, Murat Galleyev, an Uzbek citizen and two other residents of Tatarstan. Analysts say Faizov, elected as mufti in April 2011, has launched a crackdown on non-traditional clerics, some of whom are natives of the North Caucasus, and local officials believe some clerics are spreading extremism. Dozens of alleged members of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a group banned in Russia since 2003 but allowed to operate in the United States and most European Union countries, have been arrested in recent years. |
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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Russian imam's suspected murderers detained |
| 2012-07-20 |
| Five people suspected of killing a top Muslim cleric and wounding another in Tatarstan province were detained Friday, Russian prosecutors said. Valiulla Yakupov, the deputy to the province's chief mufti, was gunned down Thursday in the regional capital of Kazan. Minutes later, the chief mufti, Ildus Faizov, suffered leg wounds after an explosive device ripped through his car. Both clerics were known to be critics of the radical Islamist groups that have mushroomed in recent years in this predominantly Muslim Volga River province of 4 million people. Faizov has also been criticized by media in Tatarstan for allegedly profiting on tours he organized for Muslim pilgrims and for trying to gain control of one of the oldest and largest mosques in Kazan, which receives hefty donations from thousands of believers. The Investigative Committee said Friday that one of the suspects Rustem Gataullin, 57 owned a company that organized hajj pilgrimages, and another one Murat Galleyev, 39 heads a religious institution in Tatarstan. The 49-year-old Faizov became Tatarstan's chief mufti in 2011 and began a crackdown on radical Islamists by dismissing ultraconservative preachers and banning textbooks from Saudi Arabia, where the government-approved religious doctrine is based on Salafism. The rise in Tatarstan of radical adherents of an austere, puritanical version of Islam known as Salafism has been fueled by the influx of Muslim clerics from Chechnya and other predominantly Muslim provinces of Russia's Caucasus region, where an Islamic insurgency has been raging for years. Last year, Doku Umarov, leader of the embattled Chechen separatists, issued a religious decree calling on radical Islamists from the Caucasus to move to the densely-populated Volga River region that includes Tatarstan. Islamic radicals from the Caucasus have called for the establishment of a caliphate, an independent Islamic state under Shariah law that includes the Caucasus, Tatarstan and other parts of Russia that were once part of the Golden Horde a medieval Muslim state ruled by a Tatar-Mongol dynasty. The other three suspects in the case are Airat Shakirov, 41; Azat Gainutdinov, 31, and Abdunozim Ataboyev, a 36-year-old national of ex-Soviet Uzbekistan. The investigators did not provide any details on their occupation or background.  |
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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Twin Attacks on Top Islamic Clerics Shock Russia |
| 2012-07-20 |
| [An Nahar] The Islamic leader of Russia's main Moslem region of Tatarstan was maimed Thursday and another holy man killed in rare attacks in an oil-rich republic often praised for its religious tolerance. The Mufti of Tatarstan, Ildus Faizov, was maimed in a car kaboom while his former deputy, Valiulla Yakupov, was rubbed out in the strikes an hour apart as Moslems prepared to begin observing Ramadan at sundown. President Vladimir Putin  ...Second President of the Russian Federation and the first to remain sober. Because of constitutionally mandated term limits he is the current Prime Minister of Russia. His sock puppet, Dmitry Medvedev, was installed in the 2008 presidential elections. Putin is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law. During his eight years in office Russia's economy bounced back from crisis, seeing GDP increase, poverty decrease and average monthly salaries increase. During his presidency Putin passed into law a series of fundamental reforms, including a flat income tax of 13%, a reduced profits tax, and new land and legal codes. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to Putin. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile...said the twin attacks were a "serious signal." "This is a serious signal," Putin said in televised remarks. "We can say that no pre-emptive steps had been taken." Investigators opened a murder case while the region's leader linked the attacks in Tatarstain's main city of Kazan to the holy mans' work to promote moderate Islam. "Our leaders have followed the policy of traditional Islam. It is clear that there are other movements, and what happened today is a clear challenge," said the president of Tatarstan, Rustam Minnikhanov, pledging a firm response to radicals. "Our position should be tougher," he said in comments released by his office. Russia's top Moslem holy man Ravil Gainutdin said that those behind the attacks were seeking to place a bomb under the foundation of "peace and order of the entire Russian Federation." "I have to admit that a wave of violence has come to the Volga region too," he said. The oil-producing region on the Volga River is touted by authorities as an example of peaceful coexistence of Moslems and Christians, in contrast to the troubled North Caucasus, where the Kremlin fought two wars against separatists in the past 20 years. But over the past few years officials have sounded the alarm about radical Islam spreading to a region where secessionist sentiments ran high following the Soviet breakup. Yakupov, 48, was shot on the porch of his apartment block and died from his wounds in his car. Faizov was maimed when his vehicle went kaboom!in another part of the city, the Investigative Committee said. "The Toyota Land Cruiser with the Mufti of Tatarstan inside, Ildus Faizov, was blown up," it said. "He was thrown out of the car by the force of the blast. He has been hospitalized with wounds of varying severity." Television showed flames and smoke bursting out of Faizov's black vehicle, which regional police said he was driving. Faizov, 49, has mounted a crackdown on cut-throats among the Moslem clergy of the republic of four million inhabitants. He has said the main threat comes from followers of radical forms of Islam, Salafism and Wahhabism, whose ideology is now preached in some of the mosques in Tatarstan. "The Salafis and Wahhabis constitute a very great danger. There are no moderates among them. They all finish one day by taking up arms," Faizov said in an interview with AFP last year shortly after his election. Yakupov headed the education department of the Moslem Spiritual Directorate of Tatarstan at the time of his death, but until recently was Faizov's first deputy. In May, the Kazan Week website listed him as Tatarstan's second most influential Moslem, calling him the "strategist behind Faizov's policy of rooting out religious extremism." Russia fears that the radical Islam of the North Caucasus whose rebels are calling for the creation of an Islamic state could spread to its other historically Moslem regions. Militant leader  Doku Count DokuUmarov ... Self-styled first emir of the Caucasus Emirate. Count Doku has announced that his forces will not target civilians, but qualified that statement by saying there aren't any civilians in Russia... last year warned that his fighters were on a mission to "free the lands of our brothers," referring to Russian regions with large Moslem populations. In November 2010, three Islamists were killed in Tatarstan in a rare armed clash with police. Around half of Tatarstan's population is Moslem, but in Kazan few women wear headscarves and a huge mosque stands beside an Orthodox cathedral. "The Salafis, the Islamic bully boyz have been active in Tatarstan for the past two years," said Alexei Malashenko, an analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center. "This violent flare-up was expected." |
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