On March 12, numerous Russian information stores, following some North American publications, including The Washington Post and The New York Times, stated that a top Chechen legitimate declared a “blood feud” towards a dissident Chechen blogger in exile in Poland. The blogger in question, Tomaso Abdurakhmanov, advised AP he is taking the hazard “significantly.” There’s no cause he shouldn’t: the Chechen respectable, acknowledged through his nom de guerre Lord, actually called Magomed Daudov, is a former guerilla warlord who switched facets and now supports the Russian government. He reportedly directed the “gay purge” within the strictly Islamic republic, amongst other things, on his less-than-stellar human rights document. Abdurakhmanov, 32, isn’t any democrat himself.
He is a self-defined follower of Salafism, a strictly conventional school of Islam, and committed to the failed motive of Ichkeria, the fast-lived interwar Chechen proto-nation. The blogger rose to public prominence in 2015, driving on an avenue in Grozny, Chechnya’s capital; he supposedly failed to deliver a way to Islam Kadyrov’s cavalcade. The cousin of Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya’s all-powerful ruler, Islam Kadyrov, holds various reliable titles, including the mayor of Grozny for three years. Abdurakhmanov claims Islam Kadyrov confiscated his cell phone with the aid of force and confronted him with anti-Ramzan Kadyrov and anti-Putin caricatures, motion pictures, and different content material from his weblog. Abdurakhmanov, as he described it to journalists, was taken to be puzzled by Islam Kadyrov and senior Islamic clerics who accused him of being “hardened Wahhabi.
Following that episode, the blogger fled the United States of America and ultimately landed in Poland, where he’s presently fighting extradition to Russia. He is sought with the aid of the Russian anti-terrorist government, who accuse him of being a member of an “unlawful armed organization” preventing in Syria — a charge that Abdurakhmanov vocally denies. While in exile, Tomaso Abdurakhmanov took to YouTube to air his anger against Ramzan Kadyrov and his associates, whom he labels as “traitors” to the state for leaving behind the cause of Ichkeria and Chechen independence even as swearing loyalty to Vladimir Putin and Russia.
Magomed Daudov has long been the target of Tomaso’s video messages, sufficient for the Chechen professional to, at some point, call Abdurakhmanov on WhatsApp — incomplete knowledge that the recording could be made public — and proceed to have a 3-hour verbal exchange with the blogger. Abdurakhmanov did indeed add the 3 hours of demanding trades in Chechen and low Russian, in several components, to his YouTube channel. The first part attracted 2 to five million perspectives at the time of writing — a surprising number, given that the best 1.2 million humans live inside the republic of Chechnya.
Abdurakhmanov’s channel, under the nickname Abu Saddam Shishani, has nearly 50,000 subscribers. Soon after that, different senior cadres in Ramzan Kadyrov’s tightly run “royal” court docket (they consult with Kadyrov as “Bachchan” in Chechen, which means “padishah,” or king in Persian) also rang Tomaso Abdurakhmanov, knowing that they could be requested difficult questions or even insulted incomplete view of an internet target audience of tens of millions. In conversations watched over three million times on YouTube, conducted in the main in Chechen with Russian subtitles.
Abdurakhmanov and Daudov engage in especially frank debates about Chechnya and Russia’s recent past, the wars that annihilated the small republic and its populace, and the subsequent recovery underneath the Kadyrov own family rule. What seems to have stung Daudov the most was Abdurakhmanov’s reference to the fact that the official stocks the noble identity of the Hero of the Russian Federation with a Russian military well known universally reviled in Chechnya for his brutal counterinsurgency campaigns: Alexander Chernykh, a reporter for the newspaper Kommersant, notes in his run-down of the web debates that Daudov, in brief, hesitates, as though he’s by no means truly asked himself: how certainly did it come to this?
Seemingly at the cease of his patience, Daudov answered with a video of his very own, wherein he accused Abdurakhmanov of tarnishing Akhmat Kadyrov’s reminiscence Ramzan’s father and the primary president of the put the up-battle Chechen Republic, assassinated in the capital Grozny in 2004. What Daudov said then (“blood feud”) is a matter of some linguistic debate. Media retailers centered on the North Caucasus say the period simplest applies to narrowly defined blood revenge situations, that one circle of relatives wages on another for the homicide of considered one of its own. Since this is irrelevant in Daudov and Abdurakhmanov’s case, experts say the latter is not likely to be focused on a vendetta, even though he still needs to be at large risk, given the brutal end of some of the regime’s public enemies. In a subsequent op-ed on the concern
Alexander Chernykh also notes that those heated exchanges provide an unprecedented glimpse into painful and conflicted problems, burning warm in today’s Chechnya, ten years after the reliable end of the Second Chechen War. The wounds of conflict are clean within the North Caucasus, but public debates about its consequences are extremely rare. Most Chechens are too traumatized to talk about the warfare, specifically to the public seeking answers to questions like how they have to deal with individuals who fought for unbiased Ichkeria, then switched facets to sign up for the federal army. Are wartime subject commanders, along with Shamil Basayev, hero rebels or terrorists? While Chechen and Russian famous media and societies are busy containing the soft reminiscences of the current beyond, the ache surfaces in uncensored online debates watched by hundreds of thousands.
