Anyone remember this?
How Ukraine became the unlikely home for Isis leaders escaping the caliphate
Thursday 21 November 2019
"...Mironova estimates “hundreds” of former Isis fighters have decamped to Ukraine. But it is not the numbers that should be of primary concern, she said. The cluster of terrorists in Ukraine were by their nature a “self-selecting” elite: “This isn’t a random selection. The slower guys stop as soon as they get to Turkey. After all, it is a multiple-step operation to get to Ukraine. The ones who get there are the dangerous ones.”
Once militants get to Ukraine, they rarely encounter problems with authorities, said Mironova.
This appears to have been the case for at least some of the two years that Al Bara Shishani spent in and around Kiev. Ukrainian authorities have not disclosed when they found out about him. According to an SBU press release, theCIAand Georgian Interior Ministry joined the operation two months before his 15 November arrest. It is unclear why they chose not to arrest him earlier.
Sergatskova, who has almost single-handedly covered the subject in Ukrainian press over the past year, says authorities remain strangely relaxed about the issue.
“Whenever I wrote on the subject, government officials have accused me of inventing the problem,” she said. “But the arrest of one ofIslamic State’s top commanders here in Kiev, right under our noses, would surely suggest many of the world’s most dangerous men do think of Ukraine as a safehouse. Corruption in all state bodies – the police, courts, prosecutors – opens doors to abuse.”
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https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/isis-leaders-ukraine-tukey-syria-caliphate-al-bara-shishani-a9211676.htmlSBU had