© Sputnik/Said TsarnaevChechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. Wagner Group's fighting in Ukraine has shown once and for all that private companies are needed, Ramzan Kadyrov believes.
The Turkish operation against the Kurds in northern Syria has led to the abandonment of a dozen jails holding Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) prisoners, as well as eight camps containing their family members, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said. He expressed concern that this may cause "a surge of so-called reverse migration of terrorists back to their homeland."
Some of these IS fighters were from Chechnya and other republics in southern Russia, but Kadyrov says they should think twice about coming back.
"Chechnya is ready to ensure security in our region. We have prepared special units to do so," he told Russia's Channel 1. "We're not what we used to be in the 1990s," the Chechen leader added, referring to a large-scale radical Islamist insurgency in the republic during that period. "We'll gladly accept [IS militants], but it's unclear if they'll get tickets to the theater or the cemetery."
The "devils" from IS aren't religious fanatics trying to build their own caliphate, Kadyrov said, but just "mercenaries, trained on money from Western secret services, whose task is to follow orders."
There will definitely be an attempt to use terrorists who escaped from prisons in northern Syria against Russia, the Chechen leader said. "The aim of the US, Europe - the West - is to destroy our sovereign state. They tried doing it through Chechnya; through Ossetia; through Georgia; through Ukraine," but they will never succeed, he stated.
Ramzan Kadyrov