Speaker of the Chechen Parliament Dukuvakha Abdurakhmanov said in an exclusive interview with Al-Manar Website that Syrian President Bashar Assad is defending the Syrian sovereignty, assuring that the Chechen government supports him

Speaker of the Chechen Parliament  Dukuvakha Abdurakhmanov said in an exclusive interview with Al-Manar Website that Syrian President Bashar Assad is defending the Syrian sovereignty, assuring that the Chechen government supports him.

Answering a question about militants coming from around the Caucasus to fight in Syria, Abdurakhmanov said: “At the end of nineties, religious men from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Libya came to Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan. We thought they know Islam that we can learn of them, but we realized they know nothing, and now we are witnessing a retrograde motion. Our citizens who couldn’t be able to prove themselves in their homeland and have no religious or social position go to Syria to apply Islam! Islam, which came to us from Syria, a thousand years ago! The Wahhabism is 300 years old and not a thousand years!”

“How dare they destroy the holy sites there and attack religious scholars,” he said, adding that Chechen militants in Syria are a very small number and represent only themselves. The parliament speaker assured that they went to Syria seeking money and pride since they can’t boast with their actions in their country, but assured that the government is making efforts to prevent the citizens from going there.

“They [west] criticize and accuse us that we are defending a totalitarian regime in Syria. But Assad remains the President-elect and we have to defend and respect him for he defends the sovereignty of the Syrian people and the independence of Syria, so we support [Russian Foreign Minister Sergei] Lavrov,” Abdurakhmanov said. “If they think we live in the Caucasus mountains and understand nothing, we tell them we have studied in the same universities in Cambridge and Oxford, we witnessed and got everything! We participated in the United Nations, the European Parliament and other boards and participated in the Islamic Cooperation Conference too.”