The Federal Security Service (FSB) in Daghestan has
identified
one of two militants killed late on February 2 in Botlikh Raion (on the
border with Chechnya) as Egyptian citizen Mohmad Mohamad Shabaan, known
by the nom de guerre Seyf-Islam.
The Daghestan FSB claimed that
Seyf-Islam was part of an Al-Qaeda network operating in the North
Caucasus, and that it was he who masterminded the suicide-bomb attack
on January 6 on an Interior Ministry base in Makhachkala in which six
police officers were killed. The website
ingushetia.org,
citing ITAR-TASS, claimed that the FSB in Moscow has evidence that
Seyf-Islam organized an unspecified number of acts of sabotage
operations targeting oil pipelines, railways, and power lines at the
behest of Georgian intelligence.
According to the FSB,
Seyf-Islam, one of the pleiad of field commanders whose portraits head
the homepage of the website kavkazcenter.com, was born in 1961 and in
the early 1990s fought in Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon, and
Georgia. He is said to have arrived in Chechnya in 1992 and worked
closely beginning in 1996 with fellow Arab Khattab.
He
reportedly served as an adviser on religious affairs to Chechen
President Aslan Maskhadov, and was close to renegade field commander
Shamil Basayev. But observers question that allegation, saying that he
was never part of Maskhadov's entourage. Nor did he co-head Khattab's
training camp for Muslim fighters in Serzhen-Yurt.
North
Caucasus resistance commander Doku Umarov reportedly appointed
Seyf-Islam chief of general staff with special responsibility for
planning acts of terrorism and dispatched him to Daghestan in October
2009 to coordinate the activities of resistance units there and to
restore supply routes whereby the resistance received arms and
explosives via Georgia.
That potted biography gives the
impression of having been manufactured with the twin purposes of
linking Seyf-Islam to all the most vilified figures within the Chechen,
and then the North Caucasus insurgency, and of fleshing out
earlier allegations by FSB and Russian Interior Ministry officials of Georgian complicity, or even active collaboration, with Umarov's fighters.
Seyf-Islam
is the second prominent field commander to be killed in Daghestan in
five weeks. Daghestan front commander Amir al-Bara was killed on New
Year's Eve in an almost
identical operation when police opened fire on the car in which he was travelling.
http://www.rferl.org/content/Veteran_Arab_Field_Commander_Killed_In_Daghestan/1948601.html
