Muslim Insurrection in Europe?

Donald Trump’s temporary ban on travel from certain Islamic countries has prompted a huge outcry. Europe’s experiences with Muslims show that the ban should be welcomed as an obvious precaution against violence.

As the European Union welcomes Third World people — mostly Muslims — into Europe, the white, Christian population of Europe is declining. According to Pew Research, by 2050, the white population of Europe will have fallen from its present 553 million to 454 million, while the Muslim population is predicted to increase from 43 million to 71 million. That will be 71 million unassimilated, disgruntled Muslims. What could be the result? A possible future for Europe can be read in the headlines from Russia in the 1990s.

Russia — and the Soviet Union before it — have long had populations of disgruntled Muslims, most notably in Chechnya. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Chechens rebelled against Moscow in two bloody counterinsurgencies lasting from 1994 to 2008. If Europe ever suffers a sharp decrease in its military and political power as Russia did following the Soviet collapse, Muslims living in Europe could also rebel.

The First Chechen War began in 1994, but Chechens have fought Russians for more than 200 years. In the 19th century, Imam Shamil led a war against the Russian Empire. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Chechens briefly formed their own state until Leon Trotsky’s Red Army overran it during the Russian Civil War. During the Second World War, the Chechens revolted again, but their bid for independence ended with Lavrentiy Beria’s NKVD deporting every single Chechen to the Soviet interior, a process which killed tens of thousands. Chechens were repatriated by Nikita Khrushchev only in 1957.

After the Soviet collapse, Chechens rebelled again, touching off two bloody wars. The first war ended in in August 1996 with the signing of the Khasav-Yurt Accord, but would reignite with Shamil Basayev and Ibn al-Khattab’s invasion of neighboring Dagestan in 1999. These two wars resulted in the complete destruction of the Chechen capital of Grozny.

Western journalists write as if the Chechens were white knights defending their homeland against Russian barbarians. There is no doubt that the Russian military committed atrocities against civilians, but journalists largely ignored the Chechen ethnic cleansing of civilians, and the kidnapping and murder of soldiers and noncombatants alike.

Russian soldiers captured by Chechen fighters were often tortured, sometimes crucified and castrated. Arkady Babchenko is a Russian journalist and former soldier who served in Chechnya. In his memoir, One Soldier’s War, he writes of what happened to a Russian deserter who was captured by Chechens:

The rebels had slit him open like a tin of meat, pulled out his intestines and used them to strangle him while he was still alive. On the neatly whitewashed wall above him, written in his blood, were the words Allahu akbar – God is great.

Mr. Babchenko describes many similar cases of mutilation. Here is a video of Chechen executioners — it is not for the faint-hearted. According to Mr. Babchenko, Russian soldiers retaliated in kind, hacking Chechens to death and castrating them.

In 1994, before the Chechen insurgency, around a quarter of the population of Chechnya was Russian or Ukrainian. Those non-Chechens have largely disappeared, killed or driven off by common criminals or by the foreign Islamic fighters who came to Chechnya to help kill Russians. This was an act of ethnic cleansing that has gone unmentioned by Western journalists and activists.

In his memoir, Mr. Babchenko asserts that an estimated 30,000 Russians citizens were kidnapped and many were never seen again. Many were reportedly sold in a Grozny slave market located in “The Peoples’ Friendship Square.” Even foreigners were the victims of kidnapping. This practice may have continued. There are allegations that between 400 and 700 Ukrainian prisoners and civilians captured by Chechen mercenaries in Donbass have been sold as slaves in Chechnya and Ossetia.

With large populations of European Muslims living in enclaves and refusing to assimilate, could a Chechen-like uprising happen in Paris or Brussels? There are already militant Muslims who could be the nucleus of a rebel movement. So far they have only blown up airport terminals or driven trucks into crowds. At least 5,000 “Europeans” have left to fight for the Islamic State, and if ISIS is defeated, many are likely to return. It is hard to believe that the idea of turning European cities into war zones would not cross their minds.

For nearly two decades, the Chechens defied a superpower from their urban and mountain redoubts. By inviting Muslims into Europe, European elites are laying the foundations for a similar conflict. The percentage of radicals in the Muslim population is estimated to run from 5 to 25 percent. Even the smallest number — 5 percent — of the projected 2050 figure of 71 million Muslims in Europe is 3,500,000 potentially violent fanatics. In 1989, there were only 715,300 Chechens in all of Chechnya, and look at the havoc they wrought.

President Trump would be wise to extend the immigration ban to all Muslim countries.

Further Reading

One Soldier’s War. A. A. Bachenko. Electronic. Atlantic Books Ltd. 2008.

Leiken, Robert S. “Europe’s Angry Muslims.” Council on Foreign Relations. https://www.cfr.org/religion/europes-angry-muslims/p8218

Chechen demographic statistics: https://www.ethno-kavkaz.narod.ru/rnchechenia.html

“The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050.” Pew Research Center. https://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/europe/