One of the stranger stories from the world of foreign fighters and the Islamic State’s jihadists….
The Islamic State’s Chechen commander Abu Umar al-Shishani — who made frequent appearances on EA during his rise to Emir of Northern Syria for the jihadist group — supposedly showed up on a very different venue this week.
On Monday the 3AW radio station in Melbourne, Australia claimed that it had obtained the first interview given to Western media by Abu Omar:
In the 10-minute chat, Abu Omar denies stories of Islamic State beheadings and crucifixions of Christians as “cheap Jewish propaganda” — only “everyone who stands against us and makes trouble in our land gets crucified”. Shias are not Muslims, but “something they invented themselves”. And the Islamic State’s new Caliphate will cover “the entire world”, including Australia “if we can swim there”.
It’s a feast of soundbites to fill the script of extremists taking over Syria — if any of it is true.
There is no record of Abu Umar speaking English before this claimed interview. Born in Georgia, the jihadist’s Russian is broken and he spoke Arabic with difficulty, although he has become more fluent in the language over the months in Syria. There is no trace on the Islamic State’s media outlets and the sites of its supporters of his breakthrough appearance in Western media.
3AW boasted on its website that an Australian expert on global terrorism said “the interview was consistent with the research his centre had done into the militant group”. However, the same expert, Greg Barton, said in an article in The Australian newspaper, “It’s highly unlikely that the voice in the interview is Omar al-Shishani.”
Elliott said on Tuesday that he stood by the interview although — without explaining how the Australian station had arranged a Skype interview with one of the leading jihadists in Syria — he admitted that “Abu Umar” might have just been one of the Islamic State’s fighters:
Prior to putting him on air, we did everything we could to establish his identity as genuine. We stand by our belief that the man…was an Islamic militant fighting for the violent overthrow of the Iraqi government and the establishment of a fundamentalist caliphate. But you just never know these days, do you?
