As the worst fighting since a 1994 truce breaks out inĀ Nagorno-Karabakh, Turkey’s President Erdogan asserts himself as protector of Azerbaijan, pledging to back Baku “to the end.” (Map: Wikipedia)
“Omar the Chechen,” a top-ranking ISIS commander apparently killed in a US air-strike in Syria, is said to have been trained by the Pentagon when he fought the Russians in Georgia. (Photo via Levant Report)
Russia’s National Anti-Terrorist Committee announced that security forcesĀ killed three militants who had sworn allegiance to ISIS in a shoot-outĀ in Dagestan. (Map via La Croix International)
The government of Georgia accuses Russian military forces of encroaching on its territory in the contested South Ossetia enclave, seizing a section of BP’sĀ Baku-Supsa pipeline. (Map: Perry-CastaƱeda Library)
The Russian policy establishment is hypothesizing an ISIS hand in the bloody attack by Chechen insurgents in Groznyāand implying that the West is in turn behind ISIS. (Map via La Croix International)
With the Winter Olympics underway in Sochi, Russian special forces troops have killed several suspected militants in a series of raids in Dagestan, just across the Caucasus. (Map: Wikitravel)
Circassians are calling for a boycott of the Sochi Winter Olympics, demanding that Russia's 19th-century military campaign against their people be recognized as a genocide.
The European Court for Human Rights ruled that Russia must pay $2.6 million, to the families of 36 Chechen men who disappeared between 2000 and 2006.
In the wake of the Volgograd terror blasts, Putin is preparing a new offensive against Chechen insurgents seeking to rebuild the 19th century "Caucasus Emirate."
Voices on the left seek to play down jihadist involvement in the Chechen struggle, while the neocon right plays it up—ironically in line with Moscow's propaganda.
A deadly suicide attack on the funeral of a police officer killed the previous day in a firefight with militants may signal a new advance of the Chechen insurgency into the Ingush Republic.
Some 60,000 Azeris gathered in Baku to mark the 20th anniversary of the Khojaly massacre in the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenian forces that control the enclave have opened it to copper, lead and barite exploration.
