In recent months, a debate arose about the formation of a Muslim Battalion in Ukraine (see EDM, September 5). This was soon followed, in the Russian media, by rumors about the Crimean Tatar leadership’s alleged links with the Islamic State (IS). On October 5, 2015, the head of the State Committee of the Crimean government for International Relations and Deported Citizens, Zaur Smirnov, claimed that after the March 2014 Crimean referendum, radical Islamists fled the peninsula and relocated to the Ukrainian mainland, where they immediately started forming local cells to spread their ideology (RIA Novosti, October 9). And just days …read more
Source: The Jamestown Foundation