[RFE/RL] Chief Chechen Ramzan Kadyrov has said that he does not see the Islamic State (IS) militant group as a threat to the Russian Federation. He said that there was no point in "scaring ourselves with various ISILs".Kadyrov said that there was no threat that IS militants would join militants in Chechnya. He said, "We have a good intelligence network in the ranks of these terrorist hordes. This allows is to track the movement of those who are of interest to us. Moreover, it allows us to quickly send those who point the barrel at Russia on an eternal one-way trip."
Kadyrov said that the danger to Russia was that "the United States and Western countries had turned the Middle East into a giant springboard for terrorist training."
"They thought this up in order to destroy individual countries, to denigrate Islam to the whole world, to establish for many decades control over the resource-rich Middle East, to divert attention from other conflicts in this part of the world," he continued.
Echoing comments by Putin and Bashar al-Assad's other major ally, Iran, both of which have accused the United States of effectively creating the IS, Kadyrov said that the West had not learned anything from "the experience of bin Laden" and had "given birth to a new project, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi."
In November, the Chechen leader insisted that most ethnic Chechen fighters in Syria were not from Chechnya but were from the Chechen diaspora in Europe and the Middle East instead. Kadyrov has also repeatedly insisted that the Chechen Republic has extensive intelligence about Chechen fighters in Syria, and has even claimed (wrongly) that the IS's military commander in Syria, the ethnic Chechen Umar Shishani, was killed in November, the implication being that Umar had been assassinated by Kadyrov's men.