Warlord Who Helped Oversee Chechnya’s Brutal ‘Gay Purge’ Killed in Ukraine

Magomed Tushayev (L) and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. (Twitter/@IAPonomarenko)
PINK NEWS: Magomed Tushayev, one of the leaders behind the horrific “gay purge” in Chechnya, has been killed in Ukraine.

Tushayev was a top advisor and military commander for Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, and helped oversee a brutal so-called “purge” of LGBT+ people in the region since at least 2017.

He was reportedly killed while heading up the 141 motorised regiment of the Chechnya National Guard on Saturday (26 February), the Ukrainian news agency the Kyiv Independent reported.

Tushayev’s death was confirmed by Illia Ponomarenko, defence reporter for the Kyiv Independent, and by a spokesperson for Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, according to the Los Angeles Blade. » | Maggie Baska | Monday, February 28, 2022

A Friend and Foe: Warlord Who Thwarted the Russians Threatens Nato
Jalaluddin Haqqani was once described as 'goodness personified' by Charlie Wilson, the US congressman who helped to fund CIA support for the Afghan resistance. Photo: The Times
THE TIMES: In the year before the Soviet Army’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, there was one Mujahidin leader in particular who frustrated the efforts of General Boris Gromov, the Soviet commander.

He was Jalaluddin Haqqani, an ethnic Pashtun once described as “goodness personified” by Charlie Wilson, the US congressman who helped to fund CIA support for the Afghan resistance. From his base in northern Pakistan, Haqqani hounded Soviet troops, strung out several rounds of failed negotiations and thwarted the last big Soviet offensive, Operation Magistral, in 1987-88.

Today, Wilson is dead and General Gromov has turned to Russian politics. But Haqqani remains the figurehead of a militant army, now led by his eldest son, Sirajuddin, that is considered al-Qaeda’s main ally in the region — and as much of a threat to Nato forces as it was to the Soviets.

As a deadline looms for US troops to start withdrawing next year, the “Haqqani network”, as it is known, is playing as central a role in deciding the future of Afghanistan as it did in 1988. “The big question now is how to deal with the Haqqanis, and that’s where the US and Pakistan disagree,” one Western official familiar with operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan said. Continue reading and comment >>> Jeremy Page, Zahid Hussain, Islamabad | Monday, June 28, 2010

The Warlords Casting a Shadow over Afghanistan
THE INDEPENDENT: They are brutal, bloodthirsty – and becoming increasingly influential in Afghan politics.

Gulbuddin Hekmetyar, Faryadi Zardad and Mohammad Qasim Fahim. Photo courtesy of The Independent
One of the most feared of the Afghan warlords, Faryadi Zardad, was notorious for robbing, raping, torturing and killing travellers on the road between Kabul and Jalalabad. He kept a savage assistant in a cave who would bite and rip the flesh of his victims; other captives were murdered or imprisoned until they died of their sufferings or bribes were paid for their release.

Uniquely among the warlords of Afghanistan, many guilty of actions similar to his own, Zardad is in prison for his crimes. In 1998, as the Taliban overran Afghanistan, he fled to Britain on a fake passport. He was running a pizza restaurant in south London in 2000 when he was unmasked by the BBC, and in 2005 he was sentenced to 20 years in prison in Britain.

Zardad must consider himself exceptionally unlucky. Other warlords, who were once his comrades in arms, are now part of the political elite in Kabul, prominent members of the government or multimillionaire owners of palatial houses in the capital.

At the time Zardad was torturing and killing at his much-feared checkpoint at Sarobi on the Kabul-Kandahar road in 1992-96, he was a valued military commander in the forces of Gulbuddin Hekmetyar, the leader of the fundamentalist Hizb-e-Islami party.

Rockets and shells fired into Kabul by Hekmetyar's soldiers devastated the city and killed thousands of people before it was captured by the Taliban. More recently, Hekmetyar's forces, who are particularly strong in Logar province just south of the capital, have been fighting as allies of the Taliban.

But in the latest twist in Afghan politics, in which leaders switch sides and betray each other as swiftly as any English duke in the Wars of the Roses, Hekmetyar is reportedly about to start negotiations to join the Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai. Under a power-sharing deal, his party would supposedly fill several ministerial posts and governorships in return for abandoning the Taliban. He himself would go into exile in Saudi Arabia for three years at the end of which the US would remove him from its list of "most wanted" terrorists. >>> By Patrick Cockburn | Monday, May 11, 2009