The situation in Syria this past week developed in now typical fashion, with each of the conflicting sides claiming victories. Two events that occurred, however, should be noted. First, the armed Syrian opposition took over the strategically important Minakh military airport in the area of... MORE

Yet another Sufi sheikh has been added to the list of those killed in Dagestan. On August 3, Sheikh Ilyas-haji Ilyasov, of the branch of Islamic teaching known as the Naqshbandiyya-Khalidiyya, was murdered. The sheikh had an estimated 500–1,000 murids (followers). Ilyasov was an ethnic... MORE

On July 30, the Russian security services reported that four suspected rebels were killed in Stavropol region. A source in the local police said the incident took place on July 29 near the town of Tersky, located in Georgievsky district in the southern part of... MORE

Data just released by Georgia’s state agency for statistics (GeoStat) show a pronounced economic downturn. The robust growth that Georgia was experiencing until the October 2012 elections has petered out following the regime change. In June 2013, the economy contracted for the first time since... MORE

On July 27, a group of Dagestani traders clashed with the police near the market in Moscow’s Ochakovo-Matveyevskoye district. One police officer was injured in the fighting. The incident quickly rose to prominence in the Russian national news as video recordings proliferated across the Internet... MORE

Astrakhan is a port city on the lower part of the Volga River and a large military harbor on the Caspian Sea. To the east, Astrakhan region borders Kazakhstan; to the west, the region faces the North Caucasus. Its proximity to that unstable area is... MORE

Interviewed by the Lithuanian daily Lietuvos Rytas (July 20) and the Brussels-based EUobserver (July 29), Georgian Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili has announced that he intends to resign from the government before the end of 2013, and instead become a civil society leader. In that case,... MORE

After a year of sparring with Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov over several dozen hectares of disputed land, the president of Ingushetia decided to distinguish himself in yet another field. According to official information, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov has been strenuously trying to purge the republican interior ministry’s... MORE

Much has been and will be said about the 150th anniversary of the Circassian “genocide” by Russian forces that will be marked in 2014 when the site of that mass murder is scheduled to be the venue of the Winter Olympics. But this week marks... MORE

The high expectations on the part of Circassians of benevolence from the Russian state were cut short by the Russian government’s attitude toward the repatriation of the Syrian Circassians. “Even in a ‘life-and-death’ situation, Russia will never help us,” the well-known Circassian activist Andzor Kabard... MORE