Chechen Jihad: Al Qaeda's Training Ground and the Next Wave of Terror

Serious students of the enemies of freedom who seek to attain the best information about, insight and foresight of radical Islam - both Sunni and Shiite - will find Yoessf Bodansky's latest book "Chechen Jihad: Al Qaeda's Training Ground and the Next Wave of Terror," a "must read." Bodansky's latest page-turner lays out in clear and vivid colors the complicated history of the Islamic penetration of the Caucasus. Students of the fast spreading radical Islamic movements can discover the blue print of their modus operandi, and use it t identify and track similar activities around the world. Detractors of "Chechen Jihad" argue that since the book lacks footnotes, it is hard to verify the sources. Yet, Bodansky cites his sources clearly. In fact, Bodansky's references encourage the readers to further their understanding by looking up the many sources he uses. "Chechen Jihad: Al Qaeda's Training Ground and the Next Wave of Terror," proves yet again, that Bodansky's understanding and analysis is second to none. Had successive U.S. Administrations been less PC, and paid attention to his detailed studies, they could have developed the necessary policies and actions to curtail the spread of radical Islam in the West.

Once again, Yosef Bodansky takes us on an international tour de force as his expertise and infallible analysis proves he is the leading and ubiquitous "eye" that makes the enemies of freedom tremble. Chechin Jihad is the definitive record of events that effectively trace the Chechnyan rebellion(s) from about the time of the Crimean war to the present. The book brings to life a simple group of Islamic nationalists, with unusual detail, and their susceptibility to radical Islamic thought that actually has no place in their milieu. Many die and the struggle encompasses both the Soviet Union, present day Russia, and the Chechin rebels as they place the Caucasus into a cauldron of death and despair. The parallels between Chechyna and modern day Iraq are many, including the vast numbers of foreign muhajaden who seize control, materially and spiritually, of the local rebels. We discover that funding for the rebellion is gathered from numerous foreign sources, smuggled into Chechyna through countries one might assume are friendly to Russia, is always available, and the price for this is simple: the deaths of innocents. Throughout all of this turmoil, we find that the ultimate, social biographer Bodansky is always there taking copious notes and filling in the voids that western intelligence miss so frequently. After all, how much use is there of satellite intelligence that was gathered on cloudy days or that occurred indoors? This book contains a hidden jewel that is a solution for the present dilemma beleaguering the US in the Levant and testifies to Bodansky's unparalleled skill in unearthing meaningful information, digesting it, and presenting it to his reading public. If you wish to read this treatise and discover that there is indeed an answer to the US's problem in the Middle East, buy the book. Enemies of freedom beware, Bodansky is watching you and recording all your misdeeds.

Stunning, fresh, threatening, articulate and epic, Yoseff Bodansky's new book pulls the reader into the history and world scale virulence of the Chechen rebellion from Russia and the Soviets and the Russians again over the last two hundred years. It begins with a massive assassination and mayhem plot launched by the Chechen superman Shamil Basayev in the summer of 2006. Planned and coordinated with the jihadists of the Ummah, including Al Qaeda, Basayev and his A-Team aimed to attack the G-8 meeting at Petersburg, at the strongest concentration of security forces ever gathered, and to kill as many as possible of the G-8 leadership before taking hostages and self-destroying themselves in front of worldwide television coverage. It takes the breath. What saved the planet certain chaos and world historical terror -- it would have dwarfed even Hollywood's imagination -- was the deeply secret Russian counterintelligence force that penetrated Basayev's mad, passionate gang and struck back just days before H-Hour. This is the start of the book. What Yoseff Bodanasky then achieves is to guide the reader into the roots of the Chechen resistance, through the Chechen wars of the 1990s against Russia, to the fierce, mistake ridden, dogged Russian effort to restore order and sanity to the Caucuses. The author makes the case, using sources from a variety of unnamed intelligence services, using material never before available in English or in the West, that Chechnya is the first viable model for how nation states can confront and mitigate the jihadist poison. The jihad once threatened to engulf all the Caucuses; now, after billions have been poured into Grozny by the oil rich Russian state, the people of Chechnya have turned away from the jihadist rage and self-destruction. Yet the Russian effort is a work in progress. After Basayev, there is a new generation of Chechen jihadists who will take advantage of any weaknesses in the present fragile Caucuses. Why this story burns bright is that it is an example of what could be done in Afghanistan and Iraq -- using the conservative, native born, tribes and clans to take control of renaissance, rather than imposing Western style and ill-explained democracy on peoples who do not trust strangers. I have spoken with Yoseff Bodansky twice on my radio shows in fascination and admiration for his work. This is a new, unpredictable, deeply researched story that brings vigor and ideas to the struggling, even jingoistic, global war on terror. I recommend it to professionals, to military thinkers, to state and finance decision makers, to the careful readers of Russian and Islamic history. Screenplay writers can study Basayev for a supremely satanic model of tragedy and vengeance and self-hatred -- and not a little irony of being a local patriot who surrendered to the sellers of mass-murder. More, it can read like a science fiction story, on planet Earth. The Petersburg plot will astonish and darken you.

The first "review" posted on Yossef Bodansky's new book was clearly written by one of the "Chechen lovers", who support the Chechen jihadists regardless of their atrocities. And the "review" was clearly written without the benefit of the "reviewer" having read the book. Just another hate piece. The book by Bodansky, however, is his best yet (I got it the first day it was out), and, as someone working for the past 40 years on terrorist issues, I can vouch for its authenticity. One thing about Bodansky is that he tells the truth regardless of the consequences, and this has always stirred up the politically correct, and those with an ideological agenda. That makes his books exciting reading. More than anything, however, this new book shows how superbly his writing style has matured, and how his decades of work have given him the benefit of experience and, not surprisingly, the credibility required to have people talk to him, and offer him surprising access. Moreover, and I confess to having talked for many decades to Bodansky on these topics, I know that many committed Islamists often talk with him, off the record, because he actually understands them. So don't listen to the baying and carping lunatics of the extremist fringe. Buy the book. If you don't think it's credible, readable, and an important contribution to our understanding of the jihadi phenomenon, give me a call.

Yossef Bodansky's encyclopedic "Secret History of the Iraq War" drew criticism for having no footnotes. Turns out that persons employed in a certain critical US security organization have to sign an employment contract agreeing not to publish any book with a footnote unless the manuscript is subject to serious editing, at least, by appointed officials. Fortunately, the organization is not the boring, error-filled CIA; it seems to be a quieter one that actually knows something. And so, we can see with years of hindsight, did the author. Now this mysterious, consummately expert writer has published "Chechen Jihad," another comprehensive work. This one is on a small, combative, fearsome group that, under bombardment, dispossession, slaughter, and unceasing attack by Moscow for its intention to secede from Russia, has thrown its considerable talent and bellicosity in with the global jihad. While sullen, hormonal, anomie-laden Saudi and Pakistani rich boys may pull off ghastly stunts, the really scary guys in the game today are the Chechens. Thank heaven for Bodansky. Always ahead of other analysts, sometimes by years, and always lavish in laying out information that almost without exception has proven accurate over time, Yossef Bodansky is a secret luminary of open-source genius. In to the heart of the book, we see a thorough explanation of how Russia has poured men and vast monies into an inch-by-inch fight for territory and, in throwing in billions of petro-rubles for physical development, a fight toward a moderately peaceful society. A central premise is that outsiders can favorably influence a tribal society only by working respectfully through the existing structure of tribal elders and traditions. The brazen, contemporary American vision, sometimes well-intentioned, of uprooting everything familiar among the benighted foreigners in order to thrust in a fully-formed Twenty-first Century electoral system is guaranteed to fail. As the publisher correctly states: "Drawing on mountains of previously unseen intelligence from Islamist movements and other military and intelligence sources from throughout the Middle East and Central Asia, as well as senior officials in many of the affected nations, Chechen Jihad offers an intimate and startling portrait of the jihadist movement that is astonishing in its detail and chilling in its implications--but one that points to a new way forward in the struggle to answer the challenges of international Islamist terrorism" For a different take on events in Chechnya, see Thomas Goltz's "Chechnya Diary" (2003). Nonetheless, the polyglot and inscrutable Mr Bodansky has elegantly caught and made available a universe of knowledge that impinges heavily on all our present and future, and probably would never have been revealed otherwise.