Russia's Muslim Population Question Putin's Syrian Policy

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas listen to the Chairman of the Council of Muftis of Russia, Ravil Gainutdin, during a tour around the Moscow Grand Mosque after an opening ceremony September 23. The new mosque, which was erected on the site of the city's original mosque built in 1904 and which has been under reconstruction since 2005, will be able to accommodate up to 10,000 people at a time. ALEXEI DRUZHININ/RIA NOVOSTI/KREMLIN/REUTERS

Marc Bennetts, Newsweek: Putin’s Syria Adventure May Backfire at Home

“Assad is a heartless killer!” rages Ruslan, a middle-aged worshipper at Moscow’s biggest mosque, just days after Russia’s dramatic entry into Syria’s civil war in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. “It’s a disgrace that the Kremlin is supporting his bloody regime,” he adds, as an unseasonal snowstorm obscures the mosque’s golden domes. Another man arriving for evening prayers, a bearded 20-something named Arslan, thinks the opposite. “Russia is doing the right thing in backing the Syrian authorities against ISIS and other terrorists,” he says, adding that he has heard “nothing at all” about human rights abuses committed by Syrian government forces.

It’s hard to say what most of Russia’s estimated 20 million Muslims—around 14 percent of the country’s population—think about President Vladimir Putin’s decision to take military action against Islamic State militants (ISIS) and other opposition groups in Syria, but the move is fraught with dangers. The history of Islam in Russia is one of frequent confrontation, from the 19th-century uprising by Muslim rebels in the country’s North Caucasus region to the separatist and then Islamist wars that devastated Chechnya in the mid-1990s and early 2000s.

WNU Editor: Everyone in Russia is concerned on this Russian military deployment .... no only Muslims.