From the category archives:

Caucasus

An Aria di Dispiacere for Nabucco

by Asher Kohn

Many thanks to the good folks of Eternal Remont (“The floor of the Moscow Metro with a sweet candy coating.”) for bringing this to my attention: The director of the Nabucco Pipeline has given up on the uniting ideal behind the Nabucco Pipeline.
“Nabucco is not designed to substitute Russian gas…Nabucco is designed to offer complementary [...]

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Aliyev Must be Pandering for Votes…

by Asher Kohn

…because he just decreed that the Azeri people’s debt to the state owned gas company is kaput.
Wait, did I say “decreed”? I guess this isn’t a vote thing after all. It’s just Caucasus economics.
Aliyev looks great to his people (and his parliament). He gets to be a father of the people just like his dad. [...]

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Making Foothills out of Footnotes

by Asher Kohn

Partway through Decoding the New Taliban: Insights from the Afghan Field (which is fantastic and will be reviewed when I’m finished) I came across the following footnote to an article by Thomas Tuttig on Loya Paktia:
“‘Taliban release video of German who Targeted US Afghan Base’”[cited].…According to one source, it ‘appears the IJU is an umbrella [...]

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Army Major Disputes Story of Chechen Fighters in Afghanistan

by Joshua Foust

Some time ago, I discussed an article Philip Smucker wrote about the presence of Al Qaeda along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. I was mostly skeptical of this section in particular:
Interviews with US military commanders and American radio intercepts of Arab and Chechen fighters as well as confirmed captures or kills of foreign fighters inside [...]

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The Caucasian Bottleneck

by Joshua Foust

Steve LeVine has spent the last few weeks seeing what some ripple-effects of the Georgian war were in the rest of Central Asia. He has a nice essay up at Business Week:
Even before the Georgia mini-war, Russia was playing for keeps in the region. Starting in the 1990s, Russia often got its way by manipulating [...]

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Who even knows anymore?

by michaelhancock

Here’s a little wrap up of Caucasian mayhem.

Sadly, the list of murdered journalists on Registan has a new member, as mentioned in the comments. Magomed Yevloyev [Магомед Евлоев] was a journalist, blogger, and owner of Ingushetiya.ru. Earlier this summer his site was shut
down by court order for “extremism,” which equates to being [...]

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How Georgia Turns

by Joshua Foust

An armed clash in South Ossetia has raised tensions region-wide:
Accounts of the number killed and injured vary. South Ossetia claims six civilians killed and 22 injured after Georgian forces reportedly fired on and later shelled the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, during the night of August 1-2. Tbilisi, for its part, claims that six civilians and [...]

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Angling for an Independence

by Joshua Foust

The CS Monitor carries an interesting dispatch from Abkhazia, which is apparently turning into a hub for Russian tourism:
Butba has already restored one luxury hotel on Sukhumi’s fabled sea front and he has another hotel under reconstruction. “The way forward is to show the world that we can rebuild this country,” he says, “and then [...]

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Checking in with the Georgians and Russians with the help of Robert Frost

by michaelhancock

I don’t know how many erstwhile English majors and poetry gurus read these posts, but the recent editorials and articles covering the Georgia/Russia border debacle put me in mind of one of Robert Frost’s longer, less well-known poems, “Mending Wall.” I’ll quote a couple lines – you can find the whole thing here.
Something there [...]

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Freedom of the Press in Azerbaijan

by Marc W

I skimmed the Caucasus news today, and there are still several stories about Putin’s opposition to NATO enlargement (such as this one), but this one about an imprisoned Azeri journalist caught my eye.
Eynulla Fatullayev, the editor-in-chief of the Gundalik Azerbaijan and Realniy Azerbaijan , has been in jail since 2004 for various charges. He recently [...]

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