View allAll Photos Tagged chechen
Some peshmergas take me to the front lines of the war against ISIS. I find myself in the Taza area, just south of Kirkuk, on the road to Baghdad.
According to them, very few journalists come here. Some even said that I was the only was they saw. Nonetheless, it is a key strategic location. It is very dangerous there since Kirkuk is divided: Kurds in the north, ISIS in the south. All along the front lines you can see different units roaming about little traditional houses. Some are kept by old Kurdish vets from the 1980s wars.
Many vets have returned to war, despite being well past middle-aged and having children and grandchildren. Some even behind comfortable lives in Europe to come back, like a Swiss colonel I met. For them, it is their duty to fight for their region. Despite being autonomous and having a large secessionist movement, Kurdistan is not recognized as a state distinct from Iraq. “Some terrorists come along and now the whole world calls them the ‘Islamic State’,” complains one peshmerga, “For decades we have been trying to make the state of Kurdistan and we’ve gotten nothing!”
They have very few weapons, most of them are pre-Cold War AK47s. Some even date back to 1960. They still work, but the Kurdish forces ask for more efficient guns since ISIS has the latest weapons taken (or given) from the Iraqi army who in turn was supplied by coalition forces.
Many vets have only one working eye. The other was lost in previous wars. Once night falls, it becomes very difficult to monitor the 1000km long border. They don’t even have night vision equipment.
Last week it rained for 5 days, and it was impossible to see or hear anything. Some ISIS guys tried to gain territory, but the Kurds successfully fought them off. Their 4 wheel drives were stuck in the mud while ISIS’s brand new hummers were able to move about without issue. From the front line you can see ISIS flags. Since they told me to pack light, I didn’t bring a zoom lens. Sorry! You can see the smoke from their kitchen and even see men running from house to house.
ISIS is only 500 meters from the Kurdish position but nobody seems afraid. Peshmerga know that death is part of their fate, and even if they look like an army from another century, they will defend themselves and their country to the very end. For them, it is the highest honor to die for Kurdistan.
They protect the Baghdad road, but a few weeks ago lost it. After heavy fighting, they regained it, killing 3 Chechen ISIS fighters in the process.
Since peshmerga don’t have armored cars, it is very dangerous for them to go around safely.
The car I took to go on the front lines was very slow and made in the 80s. If we were chased by ISIS cars, we wouldn’t have stood a chance. In one day, all the materiel I saw included AK47s, a tank, an RPG, and a few gun old machines. Even if the pehsmergas say that this equipment works well, they are disappointed not to receive new ones, as Europe and USA promised.
The day after my visit, France made lot of bombings in the area, as ISIS was too close. Peshmergas take a lot of pictures, not only for souvenirs, but also to fight ISIS on the new front: social media.
They fear the roads they do not know well as ISIS pays the local farmers to put mines. Even in times of war, peshmergas are among the most welcoming people in the world. They regularly offer food and drinks.
When it was time for me to go back to the safety of Erbil, circumstances changed. The north road was closed because of an ISIS attack. The only way out was to send me through the south road that crossed Kirkuk. Let’s just say that safety there was not ideal. I had to hide my camera, and we crossed Kirkuk with an escort of armed peshmergas and a civilian car.
The soldiers were all nervous since Kirkuk is very dangerous, especially at the check points. As soon as a car was driving next to ours for too long, they were shouting at the driver to go away.
If a man was crossing the road too slowly, they threatened to hit him. These methods, employed by ISIS suicide bombers, have claimed the lives of hundred in Kirkuk. Once on the Kurdish side, they found a Kurdish taxi driver to bring me safely back to Erbil.
© Eric Lafforgue
Variations on a theme «...with a film across Russia»
Variations on a theme «My Yekaterinburg»
Camera: Canon EOS 5
Lens: Canon EF 28-105 1:3.5-4.5 USM
+ Vivitar color correction 85B filter
Film: Kodak Vision3 200t (ECNII) expired
Scanner: Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 ED
Photo taken: 17/02/2017
The black tulip is a memorial to the Ural soldiers of the internationalists who died in Afghanistan and the soldiers who died in Chechnya. It is located on the square of the Soviet Army in the square of Lunacharskogo streets - Pervomaiskaya - Mamina-Sibiryaka - Shartashskaya.
The idea of creation: Sverdlovsk regional branch of the Russian Union of Afghan Veterans (RSO RSVA)
Sculptor: Konstantin Grunberg
The author of the second part of the monument: Andrei Serov.
The artistic idea of the monument is the stylized space of a cargo military transport aircraft carrying the bodies of dead soldiers and officers to their homeland. These planes were called "black tulips" by the "Afghans" themselves.
In the center of the composition is the figure of a seated soldier with an automatic rifle around which the metal pylons imitating the skeleton of the aircraft fuselage are named with the names of the Uralians who died during the fighting in Afghanistan.
The monument is made of metal with a special coating. The weight of the central figure of the monument is 4.5 tons, the height is 4.7 meters. The height of the pylons is 10 meters. On ten pylons of the monument are 240 surnames of Sverdlov residents who died in Afghanistan.
Later, after the end of the active stage of the counter-terrorist operation in Chechnya, in 2002 this ensemble was supplemented with granite steles with the names of servicemen who died in the Chechen Republic and Dagestan.
Left to right: Canadian Armed Forces, Polish Armed Forces, Dutch Armed Forces, Israeli Defense Forces, Hamas, Russian Forces, Chechen Militia, People's Liberation Army, British Armed Forces, United States Army, Middle Eastern Coalition, United States Marine Corps, Iraqi Insurgents, Norwegian Armed forces, French Armed Forces, Australian Defense Forces, Bundeswehr Private Military Contractors(?), and African Resistance Fighters.
www.realitymod.com/forum/f10-pr-bf2-general-discussion/66...
It looks like Yemen, smells like the Lake District and is two kms away from the Chechen/Russian border
Here's a shot from the same sequence I posted a frame of the other day, but earlier in the morning before the early blue light of day began to light up the sky.
Plum Canyon in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park.
In the foreground is a barrel cactus, a fallen ocotillo, some agave, cholla, and more.
Shot with a Canon 6D and Sigma 15mm lens at 25 sec f/2.8 ISO 3200.
--- The Milky Way in different languages ---
Arabic: درب التبانة (Darb Al-Tabbāna) "Hay Merchants Way" or درب اللبانة (Darb Al-Labbāna)' "Milky Way"
Armenian: Յարդ զողի Ճանապարհ hard goghi chanaparh "Straw Thief's Way", from a myth.[1]
Basque: Esne bidea, from Latin
Bosnian: Mliječni Put, "Milky Way" translated from Latin
Bulgarian: Млечен Път, "Milky Way", translated from Latin
Catalan: Via Làctia "Milky Way", translated from Latin
Catalan: Camí de Sant Jaume, "The Road to Santiago"
Chechen: Ça Taxina Taça "the route of scattered straw"
Cherokee: ᎩᎵ ᎤᎵᏒᏍᏓᏅᏱ Gili Ulisvsdanvyi "The Way the Dog Ran Away", from a myth
Chinese: 銀河 "Silver River"
Croatian: Mliječni Put "Milky Way" translated from Latin. Traditionally it was named Kumova slama (Godfather's straw).
Czech: Mléčná dráha "Milky Way" translated from Greek or Latin
Danish: Mælkevejen "The Milky Way"
Dutch: Melkweg "Milky Way" translated from Latin
English: Milky Way, translated from Latin
Erzya: Каргонь ки "Way of the Crane"
Estonian: Linnutee "Way of Birds", from a myth
Finnish: Linnunrata "Way of Birds", from a myth
Faroese: Vetrarbreytin "The Winter Way"
French: La voie lactée "The Milky Way"
Galician: Via Láctea "Milky Way", translated from Latin
Galician: Camiño de Santiago, "The Road to Santiago"
Georgian: ირმის ნახტომი, irmis naxtomi "The Deer Jump"
German: Milchstraße "Milky Way"
Greek: Γαλαξίας κύκλος Galaxias Kyklos "Milky Circle", from a myth
Hebrew: שביל החלב "The Milky Way"
Hindi: आकाशगंगा "Ganges River of Heaven", from a myth
Hungarian: Hadak Útja "The Road of the Warriors", from a myth (historical)
Hungarian: Tejút "Milky Way"
Icelandic: Vetrarbrautin "The Winter Way"
Irish: Bealach na Bó Finne "The Fair Cow's Path"
Irish: Claí Mór na Réaltaí "Great Fence of the Stars"
Irish: Slabhbra Luigh "Lugh's Chain"
Indonesian: Bima Sakti "Poweful Bima", a character in Sanskrit epic Mahabharata
Italian: Via Lattea "Milky Way", translated from Latin
Japanese: 天の川 Ama no Gawa "River of Heaven"
Korean: 은하 eunha "Silver River", from Chinese, or "미리내"(mirinae) in pure Korean. The Milky Way is specifically called "Uri Eunha" ("Our Galaxy")
Latin: Via Lactea "Milky Way", translated from Greek
Latvian: Putnu Ceļš, The Birds' Path
Lithuanian: Paukščių Takas, The Birds' Path
Malay: Bima Sakti "Magical Bima", a character in Sanskrit epic Mahabharata
Maltese: Triq Sant' Anna, "St Anne's way"
Norwegian: Melkeveien "The Milky Way" (Bokmål, comes from Danish)
Norwegian: Vinterbrauta "The Winter Way" (Nynorsk, related to Icelandic)
Persian: راه شیری
Polish: Droga Mleczna "Milky Way", translated from Latin
Portuguese: Via Láctea "Milky Way", translated from Latin, "Estrada de Santiago" "The Road of Santiago" (less common)
Romanian: Calea Lactee "Milky Way", translated from Latin; traditional name: Calea Robilor or Drumul Robilor ("The Road of the Slaves") [3]
Russian: Млечный путь "Milky Way", translated from Latin
Sanskrit: मंदाकिनी "Mandakini", "calm or unhurried"
Scottish Gaelic: Slighe Chlann Uisnich "the path of the children of Uisneach" from celtic mythology
Serbian: Mlečni put "Milky Way", translated from Latin
Serbian: Млечни пут "Milky Way", translated from Latin
Slovak: Mliečna dráha "Milky Way", translated from Latin
Slovene: Rimska cesta "The Roman Road", because pilgrims followed it when traveling to Rome
Spanish: Via láctea "Milky Way", translated from Latin
Spanish: Compostela "Field of Stars", originally from Latin
Spanish: Camino de Santiago "The Road to Santiago"
Swedish: Vintergatan "Winter Street"
Tamil: பால் வழி "Milky Way", translated from Latin
Thai: ทางช้างเผือก "The way of the white elephant"
Turkish: Samanyolu "Road of Straw"
Ukrainian: Чумацький шлях "Way of Chumak"
Vietnamese: Ngân Hà "Silver River", translated from Chinese
Welsh: Llwybr Llaethog "Milky Way", translated from the Latin
Welsh: Caer Wydion "The Fort of Gwydion" (Gwydion)
We took a 4wd out for there days and took some very good advice by going up north to Shatili, which is about 2kms away from the Chechen/Russian border. A difficult drive along dirt tracks, mostly following the course of the rivers along the valleys, Shatili was an exceptionally beautiful spot.
Russian mercenary group revolt against Moscow fizzles but exposes vulnerabilities
By The Associated Press
today
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the owner of the Wagner Group military company, right, sits inside a military vehicle posing for a selfie photo with a local civilian on a street in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, Saturday, June 24, 2023, prior to leaving an area of the headquarters of the Southern Military District. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Prigozhin's troops who joined him in the uprising will not face prosecution and those who did not will be offered contracts by the Defense Ministry. After the deal was reached Saturday, Prigozhin ordered his troops to halt their march on Moscow and retreat to field camps in Ukraine, where they have been fighting alongside Russian troops. (AP Photo)
The greatest challenge to Russian President Vladimir Putin in his more than two decades in power fizzled out after the rebellious mercenary commander who ordered his troops to march on Moscow abruptly reached a deal with the Kremlin to go into exile and sounded the retreat.
The brief revolt, though, exposed vulnerabilities among Russian government forces, with Wagner Group soldiers under the command of Yevgeny Prigozhin able to move unimpeded into the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and advance hundreds of kilometers (miles) toward Moscow. The Russian military scrambled to defend Russia’s capital.
Under the deal announced Saturday by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, Prigozhin will go to neighboring Belarus, which has supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Charges against him of mounting an armed rebellion will be dropped.
The government also said it would not prosecute Wagner fighters who took part, while those who did not join in were to be offered contracts by the Defense Ministry. Prigozhin ordered his troops back to their field camps in Ukraine, where they have been fighting alongside Russian regular soldiers.
Putin had vowed earlier to punish those behind the armed uprising led by his onetime protege. In a televised speech to the nation, he called the rebellion a “betrayal” and “treason.”
In allowing Prigozhin and his forces to go free, Peskov said, Putin’s “highest goal” was “to avoid bloodshed and internal confrontation with unpredictable results.”
Some observers said Putin’s strongman image has taken a hit.
“Putin has been diminished for all time by this affair,” former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst said on CNN.
Moscow had braced for the arrival of the Wagner forces by erecting checkpoints with armored vehicles and troops on the city’s southern edge. About 3,000 Chechen soldiers were pulled from fighting in Ukraine and rushed there early Saturday, state television in Chechnya reported. Russian troops armed with machine guns put up checkpoints on Moscow’s southern outskirts. Crews dug up sections of highways to slow the march.
Wagner troops advanced to just 200 kilometers (120 miles) from Moscow, according to Prigozhin. But after the deal was struck, Prigozhin announced that he had decided to retreat to avoid “shedding Russian blood.”
Prigozhin had demanded the ouster of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, whom Prigohzhin has long criticized in withering terms for his conduct of the 16-month-long war in Ukraine. On Friday, he accused forces under Shoigu’s command of attacking Wagner camps and killing “a huge number of our comrades.”
If Putin were to agree to Shoigu’s ouster, it could be politically damaging for the president after he branded Prigozhin a backstabbing traitor.
The U.S. had intelligence that Prigozhin had been building up his forces near the border with Russia for some time. That conflicts with Prigozhin’s claim that his rebellion was a response to an attack on his camps in Ukraine on Friday by the Russian military.
In announcing the rebellion, Prigozhin accused Russian forces of attacking the Wagner camps in Ukraine with rockets, helicopter gunships and artillery. He alleged that Gen. Valery Gerasimov, chief of the General Staff, ordered the attacks following a meeting with Shoigu in which they decided to destroy the military contractor.
The Defense Ministry denied attacking the camps.
Congressional leaders were briefed on the Wagner buildup earlier last week, a person familiar with the matter said. The person was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity. The U.S. intelligence briefing was first reported by CNN.
Early Saturday, Prigozhin’s private army appeared to control the military headquarters in Rostov-on-Don, a city 660 miles (over 1,000 kilometers) south of Moscow, which runs Russian operations in Ukraine, Britain’s Ministry of Defense said.
Russian media reported that several helicopters and a military communications plane were downed by Wagner troops. Russia’s Defense Ministry has not commented.
After the agreement de-escalated tensions, video from Rostov-on-Don posted on Russian messaging app channels showed people cheering Wagner troops as they departed. Prigozhin was riding in an SUV followed by a large truck, and people greeted him and some ran to shake his hand. The regional governor later said that all of the troops had left the city.
Wagner troops and equipment also were in Lipetsk province, about 360 kilometers (225 miles) south of Moscow.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin declared Monday a non-working day for most residents as part of the heightened security, a measure that remained in effect even after the retreat.
Ukrainians hoped the Russian infighting would create opportunities for their army to take back territory seized by Russian forces.
“These events will have been of great comfort to the Ukrainian government and the military,” said Ben Barry, senior fellow for land warfare at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He said that even with a deal, Putin’s position has probably been weakened.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said late Saturday, shortly before Prigozhin announced his retreat, that the march exposed weakness in the Kremlin and “showed all Russian bandits, mercenaries, oligarchs” that it is easy to capture Russian cities “and, probably, arsenals.”
Wagner troops have played a crucial role in the Ukraine war, capturing the eastern city of Bakhmut, an area where the bloodiest and longest battles have taken place. But Prigozhin has increasingly criticized the military brass, accusing it of incompetence and of starving his troops of munitions.
The 62-year-old Prigozhin, a former convict, has longstanding ties to Putin and won lucrative Kremlin catering contracts that earned him the nickname “Putin’s chef.”
He and a dozen other Russian nationals were charged in the United States with operating a covert social media campaign aimed at fomenting discord ahead of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election victory. Wagner has sent military contractors to Libya, Syria, several African countries and eventually Ukraine.
___
Associated Press writers Danica Kirka in London, and Nomaan Merchant in Washington, contributed.
My latest set of shop made cutting boards. These are made of chechen (the dark wood), maple, and a mystery wook I had in my shop (the orange-ish color).
Some peshmergas take me to the front lines of the war against ISIS. I find myself in the Taza area, just south of Kirkuk, on the road to Baghdad.
According to them, very few journalists come here. Some even said that I was the only was they saw. Nonetheless, it is a key strategic location. It is very dangerous there since Kirkuk is divided: Kurds in the north, ISIS in the south. All along the front lines you can see different units roaming about little traditional houses. Some are kept by old Kurdish vets from the 1980s wars.
Many vets have returned to war, despite being well past middle-aged and having children and grandchildren. Some even behind comfortable lives in Europe to come back, like a Swiss colonel I met. For them, it is their duty to fight for their region. Despite being autonomous and having a large secessionist movement, Kurdistan is not recognized as a state distinct from Iraq. “Some terrorists come along and now the whole world calls them the ‘Islamic State’,” complains one peshmerga, “For decades we have been trying to make the state of Kurdistan and we’ve gotten nothing!”
They have very few weapons, most of them are pre-Cold War AK47s. Some even date back to 1960. They still work, but the Kurdish forces ask for more efficient guns since ISIS has the latest weapons taken (or given) from the Iraqi army who in turn was supplied by coalition forces.
Many vets have only one working eye. The other was lost in previous wars. Once night falls, it becomes very difficult to monitor the 1000km long border. They don’t even have night vision equipment.
Last week it rained for 5 days, and it was impossible to see or hear anything. Some ISIS guys tried to gain territory, but the Kurds successfully fought them off. Their 4 wheel drives were stuck in the mud while ISIS’s brand new hummers were able to move about without issue. From the front line you can see ISIS flags. Since they told me to pack light, I didn’t bring a zoom lens. Sorry! You can see the smoke from their kitchen and even see men running from house to house.
ISIS is only 500 meters from the Kurdish position but nobody seems afraid. Peshmerga know that death is part of their fate, and even if they look like an army from another century, they will defend themselves and their country to the very end. For them, it is the highest honor to die for Kurdistan.
They protect the Baghdad road, but a few weeks ago lost it. After heavy fighting, they regained it, killing 3 Chechen ISIS fighters in the process.
Since peshmerga don’t have armored cars, it is very dangerous for them to go around safely.
The car I took to go on the front lines was very slow and made in the 80s. If we were chased by ISIS cars, we wouldn’t have stood a chance. In one day, all the materiel I saw included AK47s, a tank, an RPG, and a few gun old machines. Even if the pehsmergas say that this equipment works well, they are disappointed not to receive new ones, as Europe and USA promised.
The day after my visit, France made lot of bombings in the area, as ISIS was too close. Peshmergas take a lot of pictures, not only for souvenirs, but also to fight ISIS on the new front: social media.
They fear the roads they do not know well as ISIS pays the local farmers to put mines. Even in times of war, peshmergas are among the most welcoming people in the world. They regularly offer food and drinks.
When it was time for me to go back to the safety of Erbil, circumstances changed. The north road was closed because of an ISIS attack. The only way out was to send me through the south road that crossed Kirkuk. Let’s just say that safety there was not ideal. I had to hide my camera, and we crossed Kirkuk with an escort of armed peshmergas and a civilian car.
The soldiers were all nervous since Kirkuk is very dangerous, especially at the check points. As soon as a car was driving next to ours for too long, they were shouting at the driver to go away.
If a man was crossing the road too slowly, they threatened to hit him. These methods, employed by ISIS suicide bombers, have claimed the lives of hundred in Kirkuk. Once on the Kurdish side, they found a Kurdish taxi driver to bring me safely back to Erbil.
© Eric Lafforgue
Badlands illuminated by a crescent moon (out of frame).
--- The Milky Way in different languages ---
Arabic: درب التبانة (Darb Al-Tabbāna) "Hay Merchants Way" or درب اللبانة (Darb Al-Labbāna)' "Milky Way"
Armenian: Յարդ զողի Ճանապարհ hard goghi chanaparh "Straw Thief's Way", from a myth.[1]
Basque: Esne bidea, from Latin
Bosnian: Mliječni Put, "Milky Way" translated from Latin
Bulgarian: Млечен Път, "Milky Way", translated from Latin
Catalan: Via Làctia "Milky Way", translated from Latin
Catalan: Camí de Sant Jaume, "The Road to Santiago"
Chechen: Ça Taxina Taça "the route of scattered straw"
Cherokee: ᎩᎵ ᎤᎵᏒᏍᏓᏅᏱ Gili Ulisvsdanvyi "The Way the Dog Ran Away", from a myth
Chinese: 銀河 "Silver River"
Croatian: Mliječni Put "Milky Way" translated from Latin. Traditionally it was named Kumova slama (Godfather's straw).
Czech: Mléčná dráha "Milky Way" translated from Greek or Latin
Danish: Mælkevejen "The Milky Way"
Dutch: Melkweg "Milky Way" translated from Latin
English: Milky Way, translated from Latin
Erzya: Каргонь ки "Way of the Crane"
Estonian: Linnutee "Way of Birds", from a myth
Finnish: Linnunrata "Way of Birds", from a myth
Faroese: Vetrarbreytin "The Winter Way"
French: La voie lactée "The Milky Way"
Galician: Via Láctea "Milky Way", translated from Latin
Galician: Camiño de Santiago, "The Road to Santiago"
Georgian: ირმის ნახტომი, irmis naxtomi "The Deer Jump"
German: Milchstraße "Milky Way"
Greek: Γαλαξίας κύκλος Galaxias Kyklos "Milky Circle", from a myth
Hebrew: שביל החלב "The Milky Way"
Hindi: आकाशगंगा "Ganges River of Heaven", from a myth
Hungarian: Hadak Útja "The Road of the Warriors", from a myth (historical)
Hungarian: Tejút "Milky Way"
Icelandic: Vetrarbrautin "The Winter Way"
Irish: Bealach na Bó Finne "The Fair Cow's Path"
Irish: Claí Mór na Réaltaí "Great Fence of the Stars"
Irish: Slabhbra Luigh "Lugh's Chain"
Indonesian: Bima Sakti "Poweful Bima", a character in Sanskrit epic Mahabharata
Italian: Via Lattea "Milky Way", translated from Latin
Japanese: 天の川 Ama no Gawa "River of Heaven"
Korean: 은하 eunha "Silver River", from Chinese, or "미리내"(mirinae) in pure Korean. The Milky Way is specifically called "Uri Eunha" ("Our Galaxy")
Latin: Via Lactea "Milky Way", translated from Greek
Latvian: Putnu Ceļš, The Birds' Path
Lithuanian: Paukščių Takas, The Birds' Path
Malay: Bima Sakti "Magical Bima", a character in Sanskrit epic Mahabharata
Maltese: Triq Sant' Anna, "St Anne's way"
Norwegian: Melkeveien "The Milky Way" (Bokmål, comes from Danish)
Norwegian: Vinterbrauta "The Winter Way" (Nynorsk, related to Icelandic)
Persian: راه شیری
Polish: Droga Mleczna "Milky Way", translated from Latin
Portuguese: Via Láctea "Milky Way", translated from Latin, "Estrada de Santiago" "The Road of Santiago" (less common)
Romanian: Calea Lactee "Milky Way", translated from Latin; traditional name: Calea Robilor or Drumul Robilor ("The Road of the Slaves") [3]
Russian: Млечный путь "Milky Way", translated from Latin
Sanskrit: मंदाकिनी "Mandakini", "calm or unhurried"
Scottish Gaelic: Slighe Chlann Uisnich "the path of the children of Uisneach" from celtic mythology
Serbian: Mlečni put "Milky Way", translated from Latin
Serbian: Млечни пут "Milky Way", translated from Latin
Slovak: Mliečna dráha "Milky Way", translated from Latin
Slovene: Rimska cesta "The Roman Road", because pilgrims followed it when traveling to Rome
Spanish: Via láctea "Milky Way", translated from Latin
Spanish: Compostela "Field of Stars", originally from Latin
Spanish: Camino de Santiago "The Road to Santiago"
Swedish: Vintergatan "Winter Street"
Tamil: பால் வழி "Milky Way", translated from Latin
Thai: ทางช้างเผือก "The way of the white elephant"
Turkish: Samanyolu "Road of Straw"
Ukrainian: Чумацький шлях "Way of Chumak"
Vietnamese: Ngân Hà "Silver River", translated from Chinese
Welsh: Llwybr Llaethog "Milky Way", translated from the Latin
Welsh: Caer Wydion "The Fort of Gwydion" (Gwydion)
Milana is killing the time among the ruins of Grozny during the Second Chechen War (1999-2009). Milana is a russian trained killer. Her mission is to neutralize Chechen terrorists leaders under the command of Aslan Maskhadov. View on black
Let me introduce you my new 1/6 scaled character Milana, better known under the nickname : Razorblade. Kontraktnikis, contract soldiers who have replaced regular russian troops in Chechenya, spread some stories about her nickname. In her childhood some tells she was daily raped by her father, until one day she cut off his genitals parts with a razor blade. Others tells she likes to cut off the tongue of her targets before of after they died, and she keep all her trophies on a necklace. Lots of story are put about Milana, nobody knows her past. One thing is certain, despite her lovely features, she's a cold heart killer, who is capable of the worst.
My first 1/6 scale diorama !
The figure : Female PMC baby
The gun : M14 sniper rifle
Don't forget to visit my Red Bubble Store, some times new stuff which is not visible on my flickr is avalaible.
My son has become fascinated with bitcoins, and so I had to get him a tangible one for Xmas. The public key is imprinted visibly on the tamper-evident holographic film, and the private key lies underneath. (Casascius)
I too was fascinated by digital cash back in college, and more specifically by the asymmetric mathematical transforms underlying public-key crypto and digital blind signatures.
I remembered a technical paper I wrote, but could not find it. A desktop search revealed an essay that I completely forgot, something that I had recovered from my archives of floppy discs (while I still could).
It is an article I wrote for the school newspaper in 1994. Ironically, Microsoft Word could not open this ancient Microsoft Word file format, but the free text editors could.
What a fun time capsule, below, with some choice naivetés…
I am trying to reconstruct what I was thinking. I was arguing that a bulletproof framework for digital cash (and what better testing ground) could be used to secure a digital container for executable code on a rental basis. So the expression of an idea — the specific code, or runtime service — is locked in a secure container. The idea would be to prevent copying instead of punishing after the fact.
Micro-currency and micro-code seem like similar exercises in regulating the single use of an issued number.
Now that the Bitcoin experiment is underway, do you know of anyone writing about it as an alternative framework for intellectual property (from digital art to code to governance tokens)?
IP and Digital Cash
@NORMAL:
Digital Cash and the “Intellectual Property” Oxymoron
By Steve Jurvetson
Many of us will soon be working in the information services or technology industries which are currently tangled in a bramble patch of intellectual property law. As the law struggles to find coherency and an internally-consistent logic for intellectual property (IP) protection, digital encryption technologies may provide a better solution — from the perspective of reducing litigation, exploiting the inherent benefits of an information-based business model, and preserving a free economy of ideas.
Bullet-proof digital cash technology, which is now emerging, can provide a protected “cryptographic container” for intellectual expressions, thereby preserving traditional notions of intellectual property that protect specific instantiations of an idea rather than the idea itself. For example, it seems reasonable that Intuit should be able to protect against the widespread duplication of their Quicken software (the expression of an idea), but they should not be able to patent the underlying idea of single-entry bookkeeping. There are strong economic incentives for digital cash to develop and for those techniques to be adapted for IP protection — to create a protected container or expression of an idea. The rapid march of information technology has strained the evolution of IP law, but rather than patching the law, information technology itself may provide a more coherent solution.
Information Wants To Be Free
Currently, IP law is enigmatic because it is expanding to a domain for which it was not initially intended. In developing the U.S. Constitution, Thomas Jefferson argued that ideas should freely transverse the globe, and that ideas were fundamentally different from material goods. He concluded that “Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.” The issues surrounding IP come into sharp focus as we shift to being more of an information-based economy.
The use of e-mail and local TV footage helps disseminate information around the globe and can be a force for democracy — as seen in the TV footage from Chechen, the use of modems in Prague during the Velvet Revolution, and the e-mail and TV from Tianammen Square. Even Gorbachev used a video camera to show what was happening after he was kidnapped. What appears to be an inherent force for democracy runs into problems when it becomes the subject of property.
As higher-level programming languages become more like natural languages, it will become increasingly difficult to distinguish the idea from the code. Language precedes thought, as Jean-Louis Gassée is fond of saying, and our language is the framework for the formulation and expression of our ideas. Restricting software will increasingly be indistinguishable from restricting freedom of speech.
An economy of ideas and human attention depends on the continuous and free exchange of ideas. Because of the associative nature of memory processes, no idea is detached from others. This begs the question, is intellectual property an oxymoron?
Intellectual Property Law is a Patch
John Perry Barlow, former Grateful Dead lyricist and co-founder (with Mitch Kapor) of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argues that “Intellectual property law cannot be patched, retrofitted or expanded to contain digitized expression... Faith in law will not be an effective strategy for high-tech companies. Law adapts by continuous increments and at a pace second only to geology. Technology advances in lunging jerks. Real-world conditions will continue to change at a blinding pace, and the law will lag further behind, more profoundly confused. This mismatch may prove impossible to overcome.”
From its origins in the Industrial Revolution where the invention of tools took on a new importance, patent and copyright law has protected the physical conveyance of an idea, and not the idea itself. The physical expression is like a container for an idea. But with the emerging information superhighway, the “container” is becoming more ethereal, and it is disappearing altogether. Whether it’s e-mail today, or the future goods of the Information Age, the “expressions” of ideas will be voltage conditions darting around the net, very much like thoughts. The fleeting copy of an image in RAM is not very different that the fleeting image on the retina.
The digitization of all forms of information — from books to songs to images to multimedia — detaches information from the physical plane where IP law has always found definition and precedent. Patents cannot be granted for abstract ideas or algorithms, yet courts have recently upheld the patentability of software as long as it is operating a physical machine or causing a physical result. Copyright law is even more of a patch. The U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 requires that works be fixed in a durable medium, and where an idea and its expression are inseparable, the merger doctrine dictates that the expression cannot be copyrighted. E-mail is not currently copyrightable because it is not a reduction to tangible form. So of course, there is a proposal to amend these copyright provisions. In recent rulings, Lotus won its case that Borland’s Quattro Pro spreadsheet copied elements of Lotus 123’s look and feel, yet Apple lost a similar case versus Microsoft and HP. As Professor Bagley points out in her new text, “It is difficult to reconcile under the total concept and feel test the results in the Apple and Lotus cases.” Given the inconsistencies and economic significance of these issues, it is no surprise that swarms of lawyers are studying to practice in the IP arena.
Back in the early days of Microsoft, Bill Gates wrote an inflammatory “Open Letter to Hobbyists” in which he alleged that “most of you steal your software ... and should be kicked out of any club meeting you show up at.” He presented the economic argument that piracy prevents proper profit streams and “prevents good software from being written.” Now we have Windows.
But seriously, if we continue to believe that the value of information is based on scarcity, as it is with physical objects, we will continue to patch laws that are contrary to the nature of information, which in many cases increases in value with distribution. Small, fast moving companies (like Netscape and Id) protect their ideas by getting to the marketplace quicker than their larger competitors who base their protection on fear and litigation.
The patent office is woefully understaffed and unable to judge the nuances of software. Comptons was initially granted a patent that covered virtually all multimedia technology. When they tried to collect royalties, Microsoft pushed the Patent Office to overturn the patent. In 1992, Software Advertising Corp received a patent for “displaying and integrating commercial advertisements with computer software.” That’s like patenting the concept of a radio commercial. In 1993, a DEC engineer received a patent on just two lines of machine code commonly used in object-oriented programming. CompuServe announced this month that they plan to collect royalties on the widely used GIF file format for images.
The Patent Office has issued well over 12,000 software patents, and a programmer can unknowingly be in violation of any them. Microsoft had to pay $120MM to STAC in February 1994 for violating their patent on data compression. The penalties can be costly, but so can a patent search. Many of the software patents don’t have the words “computer,” “software,” “program,” or “algorithm” in their abstracts. “Software patents turn every decision you make while writing a program into a legal risk,” says Richard Stallman, founder of the League for Programming Freedom. “They make writing a large program like crossing a minefield. Each step has a small chance of stepping on a patent and blowing you up.” The very notion of seventeen years of patent protection in the fast moving software industry seems absurd. MS-DOS did not exist seventeen years ago.
IP law faces the additional wrinkle of jurisdictional issues. Where has an Internet crime taken place? In the country or state in which the computer server resides? Many nations do not have the same intellectual property laws as the U.S. Even within the U.S., the law can be tough to enforce; for example, a group of music publishers sued CompuServe for the digital distribution of copyrighted music. A complication is that CompuServe has no knowledge of the activity since it occurs in the flood of bits transferring between its subscribers
The tension seen in making digital copies revolves around the issue of property. But unlike the theft of material goods, copying does not deprive the owner of their possessions. With digital piracy, it is less a clear ethical issue of theft, and more an abstract notion that you are undermining the business model of an artist or software developer. The distinction between ethics and laws often revolves around their enforceability. Before copy machines, it was hard to make a book, and so it was obvious and visible if someone was copying your work. In the digital age, copying is lightning fast and difficult to detect. Given ethical ambiguity, convenience, and anonymity, it is no wonder we see a cultural shift with regard to digital ethics.
Piracy, Plagiarism and Pilfering
We copy music. We are seldom diligent with our footnotes. We wonder where we’ve seen Strat-man’s PIE and the four slices before. We forward e-mail that may contain text from a copyrighted news publication. The SCBA estimates that 51% of satellite dishes have illegal descramblers. John Perry Barlow estimates that 90% of personal hard drives have some pirated software on them.
Or as last month’s Red Herring editorial points out, “this atmosphere of electronic piracy seems to have in turn spawned a freer attitude than ever toward good old-fashioned plagiarism.” Articles from major publications and WSJ columns appear and circulate widely on the Internet. Computer Pictures magazine replicated a complete article on multimedia databases from New Media magazine, and then publicly apologized.
Music and voice samples are an increasingly common art form, from 2 Live Crew to Negativland to local bands like Voice Farm and Consolidated. Peter Gabriel embraces the shift to repositioned content; “Traditionally, the artist has been the final arbiter of his work. He delivered it and it stood on its own. In the interactive world, artists will also be the suppliers of information and collage material, which people can either accept as is, or manipulate to create their own art. It’s part of the shift from skill-based work to decision-making and editing work.”
But many traditionalists resist the change. Museums are hesitant to embrace digital art because it is impossible to distinguish the original from a copy; according to a curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, “The art world is scared to death of this stuff.” The Digital Audio Tape debate also illustrated the paranoia; the music industry first insisted that these DAT recorders had to purposely introduce static into the digital copies they made, and then they settled for an embedded code that limited the number of successive copies that could be made from the a master source.
For a healthier reaction, look at the phenomenally successful business models of Mosaic/Netscape and Id Software, the twisted creator of Doom. Just as McAfee built a business on shareware, Netscape and Id encourage widespread free distribution of their product. But once you want support from Netscape, or the higher levels of the Doom game, then you have to pay. For industries with strong demand-side economies of scale, such as Netscape web browsers or Safe-TCL intelligent agents, the creators have exploited the economies of information distribution. Software products are especially susceptible to increasing returns with scale, as are networking products and most of the information technology industries.
Yet, the Software Publishers Association reports that 1993 worldwide losses to piracy of business application software totaled $7.45 billion. They also estimated that 89% of software units in Korea were counterfeit. And China has 29 factories, some state-owned, that press 75 million pirated CDs per year, largely for export. GATT will impose the U.S. notions of intellectual property on a world that sees the issue very differently.
Clearly there are strong economic incentives to protect intellectual property, and reasonable arguments can be made for software patents and digital copyright, but the complexities of legal enforcement will be outrun and potentially obviated by the relatively rapid developments of another technology, digital cash and cryptography.
Digital Cash and the IP Lock
Digital cash is in some ways an extreme example of digital “property” -- since it cannot be copied, it is possessed by one entity at a time, and it is static and non-perishable. If the techniques for protecting against pilferage and piracy work in the domain of cash, then they can be used to “protect” other properties by being embedded in them. If I wanted to copy-protect an “original” work of digital art, digital cash techniques can be used as the “container” to protect intellectual property in the old style. A bullet-proof digital cash scheme would inevitably be adapted by those who stand to gain from the current system. Such as Bill Gates.
Several companies are developing technologies for electronic commerce. On January 12, several High-Tech Club members attended the Cybermania conference on electronic commerce with the CEOs of Intuit, CyberCash, Enter TV and The Lightspan Partnership. According to Scott Cook, CEO of Intuit, the motivations for digital cash are anonymity and efficient small-transaction Internet commerce. Anonymity preserves our privacy in the age of increasingly intrusive “database marketing” based on credit card purchase patterns and other personal information. Of course, it also has tax-evasion implications. For Internet commerce, cash is more efficient and easier to use than a credit card for small transactions.
“A lot of people will spend nickels on the Internet,” says Dan Lynch of CyberCash. Banks will soon exchange your current cash for cyber-tokens, or a “bag of bits” which you can spend freely on the Internet. A competitor based in the Netherlands called DigiCash has a Web page with numerous articles on electronic money and fully functional demo of their technology. You can get some free cash from them and spend it at some of their allied vendors.
Digital cash is a compelling technology. Wired magazine calls it the “killer application for electronic networks which will change the global economy.” Handling and fraud costs for the paper money system are growing as digital color copiers and ATMs proliferate. Donald Gleason, President of the Smart Card Enterprise unit of Electronic Payment Services argues that “Cash is a nightmare. It costs money handlers in the U.S. alone approximately $60 billion a year to move the stuff... Bills and coinage will increasingly be replaced by some sort of electronic equivalent.” Even a Citibank VP, Sholom Rosen, agrees that “There are going to be winners and losers, but everybody is going to play.”
The digital cash schemes use a blind digital signature and a central repository to protect against piracy and privacy violations. On the privacy issue, the techniques used have been mathematically proven to be protected against privacy violations. The bank cannot trace how the cash is being used or who is using it. Embedded in these schemes are powerful digital cryptography techniques which have recently been spread in the commercial domain (RSA Data Security is a leader in this field and will be speaking to the High Tech Club on January 19).
To protect against piracy requires some extra work. As soon as I have a digital $5 bill on my Mac hard drive, I will want to make a copy, and I can. (Many companies have busted their picks trying to copy protect files from hackers. It will never work.). The difference is that I can only spend the $5 bill once. The copy is worthless. This is possible because every bill has a unique encrypted identifier. In spending the bill, my computer checks with the centralized repository which verifies that my particular $5 bill is still unspent. Once I spend it, it cannot be spent again. As with many electronic transactions today, the safety of the system depends on the integrity of a centralized computer, or what Dan Lynch calls “the big database in the sky.”
One of the most important limitations of the digital cash techniques is that they are tethered to a transaction between at least three parties — a buyer, seller and central repository. So, to use such a scheme to protect intellectual property, would require networked computers and “live” files that have to dial up and check in with the repository to be operational. There are many compelling applications for this, including voter registration, voting tabulation, and the registration of digital artwork originals.
When I asked Dan Lynch about the use of his technology for intellectual property protection, he agreed that the bits that now represent a $5 bill could be used for any number of things, from medical records to photographs. A digital photograph could hide a digital signature in its low-order bits, and it would be imperceptible to the user. But those bits could be used with a registry of proper image owners, and could be used to prove misappropriation or sampling of the image by others.
Technology author Steven Levy has been researching cryptography for Wired magazine, and he responded to my e-mail questions with the reply “You are on the right track in thinking that crypto can preserve IP. I know of several attempts to forward plans to do so.” Digital cash may provide a “crypto-container” to preserve traditional notions of intellectual property.
The transaction tether limits the short-term applicability of these schemes for software copy protection. They won’t work on an isolated computer. This certainly would slow its adoption for mobile computers since the wireless networking infrastructure is so nascent. But with Windows ’95 bundling network connectivity, soon most computers will be network-ready — at least for the Microsoft network. And now that Bill Gates is acquiring Intuit, instead of dollar bills, we will have Bill dollars.
The transaction tether is also a logistical headache with current slow networks, which may hinder its adoption for mass-market applications. For example, if someone forwards a copyrighted e-mail, the recipient may have to have their computer do the repository check before they could see the text of the e-mail. E-mail is slow enough today, but in the near future, these techniques of verifying IP permissions and paying appropriate royalties in digital cash could be background processes on a preemptive multitasking computer (Windows ’95 or Mac OS System 8). The digital cash schemes are consistent with other trends in software distribution and development — specifically software rental and object-oriented “applets” with nested royalty payments. They are also consistent with the document-centric vision of Open Doc and OLE.
The user of the future would start working on their stationary. When it’s clear they are doing some text entry, the word processor would be downloaded and rented for its current usage. Digital pennies would trickle back to the people who wrote or inspired the various portions of the core program. As you use other software applets, such as a spell-checker, it would be downloaded as needed. By renting applets, or potentially finer-grained software objects, the licensing royalties would be automatically tabulated and exchanged, and software piracy would require heroic efforts. Intellectual property would become precisely that — property in a market economy, under lock by its “creator,” and Bill Gates’ 1975 lament over software piracy may now be addressed 20 years later.
--------end of paper-----------
2013 & 2021 update: On further reflection, I was focused on executable code (where the runtime requires a cloud connect to authenticate, given the third party element of Digicash. (The blockchain fixed this). Verification has been a pain, but perhaps it's seamless in a web-services future. Cloud apps and digital cash depend on it, so why not the code itself.
It could verify the official owner of any unique bundle of pixels, in the sense that you can "own" a sufficiently large number, but not the essence of a work of art or derivative works (what we call NFTs today). Frankly, I'm not sure about non-interactive content in general, like pure video playback. "Fixing" software IP alone would be a big enough accomplishment.
Some peshmergas take me to the front lines of the war against ISIS. I find myself in the Taza area, just south of Kirkuk, on the road to Baghdad.
According to them, very few journalists come here. Some even said that I was the only was they saw. Nonetheless, it is a key strategic location. It is very dangerous there since Kirkuk is divided: Kurds in the north, ISIS in the south. All along the front lines you can see different units roaming about little traditional houses. Some are kept by old Kurdish vets from the 1980s wars.
Many vets have returned to war, despite being well past middle-aged and having children and grandchildren. Some even behind comfortable lives in Europe to come back, like a Swiss colonel I met. For them, it is their duty to fight for their region. Despite being autonomous and having a large secessionist movement, Kurdistan is not recognized as a state distinct from Iraq. “Some terrorists come along and now the whole world calls them the ‘Islamic State’,” complains one peshmerga, “For decades we have been trying to make the state of Kurdistan and we’ve gotten nothing!”
They have very few weapons, most of them are pre-Cold War AK47s. Some even date back to 1960. They still work, but the Kurdish forces ask for more efficient guns since ISIS has the latest weapons taken (or given) from the Iraqi army who in turn was supplied by coalition forces.
Many vets have only one working eye. The other was lost in previous wars. Once night falls, it becomes very difficult to monitor the 1000km long border. They don’t even have night vision equipment.
Last week it rained for 5 days, and it was impossible to see or hear anything. Some ISIS guys tried to gain territory, but the Kurds successfully fought them off. Their 4 wheel drives were stuck in the mud while ISIS’s brand new hummers were able to move about without issue. From the front line you can see ISIS flags. Since they told me to pack light, I didn’t bring a zoom lens. Sorry! You can see the smoke from their kitchen and even see men running from house to house.
ISIS is only 500 meters from the Kurdish position but nobody seems afraid. Peshmerga know that death is part of their fate, and even if they look like an army from another century, they will defend themselves and their country to the very end. For them, it is the highest honor to die for Kurdistan.
They protect the Baghdad road, but a few weeks ago lost it. After heavy fighting, they regained it, killing 3 Chechen ISIS fighters in the process.
Since peshmerga don’t have armored cars, it is very dangerous for them to go around safely.
The car I took to go on the front lines was very slow and made in the 80s. If we were chased by ISIS cars, we wouldn’t have stood a chance. In one day, all the materiel I saw included AK47s, a tank, an RPG, and a few gun old machines. Even if the pehsmergas say that this equipment works well, they are disappointed not to receive new ones, as Europe and USA promised.
The day after my visit, France made lot of bombings in the area, as ISIS was too close. Peshmergas take a lot of pictures, not only for souvenirs, but also to fight ISIS on the new front: social media.
They fear the roads they do not know well as ISIS pays the local farmers to put mines. Even in times of war, peshmergas are among the most welcoming people in the world. They regularly offer food and drinks.
When it was time for me to go back to the safety of Erbil, circumstances changed. The north road was closed because of an ISIS attack. The only way out was to send me through the south road that crossed Kirkuk. Let’s just say that safety there was not ideal. I had to hide my camera, and we crossed Kirkuk with an escort of armed peshmergas and a civilian car.
The soldiers were all nervous since Kirkuk is very dangerous, especially at the check points. As soon as a car was driving next to ours for too long, they were shouting at the driver to go away.
If a man was crossing the road too slowly, they threatened to hit him. These methods, employed by ISIS suicide bombers, have claimed the lives of hundred in Kirkuk. Once on the Kurdish side, they found a Kurdish taxi driver to bring me safely back to Erbil.
© Eric Lafforgue
Variations on a theme «...with a film across Russia»
Variations on a theme «My Yekaterinburg»
Camera: Canon EOS 5
Lens: Canon EF 28-105 1:3.5-4.5 USM
+ Vivitar color correction 85B filter
Film: Kodak Vision3 200t (ECNII) expired
Photo taken: 17/02/2017
Scanner: Pakon F235+
The black tulip is a memorial to the Ural soldiers of the internationalists who died in Afghanistan and the soldiers who died in Chechnya. It is located on the square of the Soviet Army in the square of Lunacharskogo streets - Pervomaiskaya - Mamina-Sibiryaka - Shartashskaya.
The idea of creation: Sverdlovsk regional branch of the Russian Union of Afghan Veterans (RSO RSVA)
Sculptor: Konstantin Grunberg
The author of the second part of the monument: Andrei Serov.
The artistic idea of the monument is the stylized space of a cargo military transport aircraft carrying the bodies of dead soldiers and officers to their homeland. These planes were called "black tulips" by the "Afghans" themselves.
In the center of the composition is the figure of a seated soldier with an automatic rifle around which the metal pylons imitating the skeleton of the aircraft fuselage are named with the names of the Uralians who died during the fighting in Afghanistan.
The monument is made of metal with a special coating. The weight of the central figure of the monument is 4.5 tons, the height is 4.7 meters. The height of the pylons is 10 meters. On ten pylons of the monument are 240 surnames of Sverdlov residents who died in Afghanistan.
Later, after the end of the active stage of the counter-terrorist operation in Chechnya, in 2002 this ensemble was supplemented with granite steles with the names of servicemen who died in the Chechen Republic and Dagestan.
Close to the Chechen border, in Georgia you can find this ruin of an old village-fortress on top of a mountain. The age old constructions just barely keep together, with loose stones. You can only have the wildest idea about how families lived here. The walk up was dangerous, with some tough wind, but the views were spectacular.
Die Innenseiten des Paravents hat Mattheuer mit einer Collage aus Zeitungsfotos sehr verschiedener Jahre beklebt. Ein Foto ließ mich stocken, es stammt aus Russlands Erstem Tschetschenienkrieg von 1994-1996 und wirkt erschreckend aktuell.
Mattheuer has covered the inside of the screen with a collage of newspaper photos from very different years. One photo made me freeze; it is from Russia's First Chechen War of 1994-1996 and seems frighteningly topical.
Das Kunsthaus DAS MINSK ist ein im September 2022 eröffnetes Museum für zeitgenössische Kunst. In ihm sollen jeweils Werke von Künstlern aus der früheren DDR im Dialog mit aktuellen Kunstwerken gezeigt werden. Die Eröffnungsschau ist dem bedeutenden Maler und Bildhauer Wolfgang Mattheuer (1927-1904) gewidmet. Mattheuer malte u. a. oft seinen Garten im heimatlichen Vogtland. Und so wurden als moderner Kontrapunkt eine Fotoserie und eine Videoinstallation des kanadischen Fotografen Stan Douglas über Schrebergärten in Potsdam in den 1990-er Jahren ausgewählt.
DAS MINSK Art House is a museum for contemporary art that opened in September 2022. The opening exhibition is dedicated to the important painter and sculptor Wolfgang Mattheuer (1927-1904). Among other things, Mattheuer often painted his garden in his native region of Vogtland. And so, as a modern counterpoint, were chosen a photo series and a video installation by the Canadian photographer Stan Douglas about allotment gardens in Potsdam in the 1990s.
Some peshmergas take me to the front lines of the war against ISIS. I find myself in the Taza area, just south of Kirkuk, on the road to Baghdad.
According to them, very few journalists come here. Some even said that I was the only was they saw. Nonetheless, it is a key strategic location. It is very dangerous there since Kirkuk is divided: Kurds in the north, ISIS in the south. All along the front lines you can see different units roaming about little traditional houses. Some are kept by old Kurdish vets from the 1980s wars.
Many vets have returned to war, despite being well past middle-aged and having children and grandchildren. Some even behind comfortable lives in Europe to come back, like a Swiss colonel I met. For them, it is their duty to fight for their region. Despite being autonomous and having a large secessionist movement, Kurdistan is not recognized as a state distinct from Iraq. “Some terrorists come along and now the whole world calls them the ‘Islamic State’,” complains one peshmerga, “For decades we have been trying to make the state of Kurdistan and we’ve gotten nothing!”
They have very few weapons, most of them are pre-Cold War AK47s. Some even date back to 1960. They still work, but the Kurdish forces ask for more efficient guns since ISIS has the latest weapons taken (or given) from the Iraqi army who in turn was supplied by coalition forces.
Many vets have only one working eye. The other was lost in previous wars. Once night falls, it becomes very difficult to monitor the 1000km long border. They don’t even have night vision equipment.
Last week it rained for 5 days, and it was impossible to see or hear anything. Some ISIS guys tried to gain territory, but the Kurds successfully fought them off. Their 4 wheel drives were stuck in the mud while ISIS’s brand new hummers were able to move about without issue. From the front line you can see ISIS flags. Since they told me to pack light, I didn’t bring a zoom lens. Sorry! You can see the smoke from their kitchen and even see men running from house to house.
ISIS is only 500 meters from the Kurdish position but nobody seems afraid. Peshmerga know that death is part of their fate, and even if they look like an army from another century, they will defend themselves and their country to the very end. For them, it is the highest honor to die for Kurdistan.
They protect the Baghdad road, but a few weeks ago lost it. After heavy fighting, they regained it, killing 3 Chechen ISIS fighters in the process.
Since peshmerga don’t have armored cars, it is very dangerous for them to go around safely.
The car I took to go on the front lines was very slow and made in the 80s. If we were chased by ISIS cars, we wouldn’t have stood a chance. In one day, all the materiel I saw included AK47s, a tank, an RPG, and a few gun old machines. Even if the pehsmergas say that this equipment works well, they are disappointed not to receive new ones, as Europe and USA promised.
The day after my visit, France made lot of bombings in the area, as ISIS was too close. Peshmergas take a lot of pictures, not only for souvenirs, but also to fight ISIS on the new front: social media.
They fear the roads they do not know well as ISIS pays the local farmers to put mines. Even in times of war, peshmergas are among the most welcoming people in the world. They regularly offer food and drinks.
When it was time for me to go back to the safety of Erbil, circumstances changed. The north road was closed because of an ISIS attack. The only way out was to send me through the south road that crossed Kirkuk. Let’s just say that safety there was not ideal. I had to hide my camera, and we crossed Kirkuk with an escort of armed peshmergas and a civilian car.
The soldiers were all nervous since Kirkuk is very dangerous, especially at the check points. As soon as a car was driving next to ours for too long, they were shouting at the driver to go away.
If a man was crossing the road too slowly, they threatened to hit him. These methods, employed by ISIS suicide bombers, have claimed the lives of hundred in Kirkuk. Once on the Kurdish side, they found a Kurdish taxi driver to bring me safely back to Erbil.
© Eric Lafforgue
I learned something interesting about pears this morning, so I'll share it.
"The pear tree was an object of particular veneration (as was the walnut) in the tree worship of the Nakh peoples of the North Caucasus – see Vainakh mythology and see also Ingushetia – the best-known of the Vainakh peoples today being the Chechens of Chechnya. Pear and walnut trees were held to be the sacred abodes of beneficent spirits in pre-Islamic Chechen religion and, for this reason, it was forbidden to fell them." - Wikipedia
Now I'll take even greater care of the pear tree that I have in front of the house.
Embarking on a Great Journey
Part 2. Appreciation and admiration of the world
(2018)
The Lesser-walked Route
The journey across the massive Eurasian continent began by first crossing from the Georgian side of the Caucasus mountains into the Russian Federation. For Western travellers, Russia is well-known to be a bureaucratic nightmare requiring difficult-to-get visas and being full of corrupt police hungry for trouble. And as for Western governments and media, there is always a negative undertone whenever Russia is mentioned - especially the British and the American ones. We all know that what we see and hear shapes our perspectives on things we have never experienced ourselves, and information can often be manipulated easily misleading us, shaping our views of the world. I always had a slight fear of going to Russia myself, as I had been to another former Soviet Union country (Kazakhstan) ten years ago and had encountered corrupt police practice and an onslaught of bad attitudes and suspicion from everyone from the border guards to supermarket checkout staff. It was a bit daunting dealing with that, on the frozen steppe, as a twenty one year old kid – let alone now crossing barren swaths of land alone, with no one else around… in a car that could break down, which could cause a customs nightmare, since you have to take the car out of the country with you when you leave. And Russia is not really a country I wanted to mess with. All these what ifs…
Experience remains within people in the form of memories (and often as fear), and so naturally, I was a bit nervous about entering Russia - after all it was the mother of the Soviet Union, and one of those places perceived as being a bit off limits for historical reasons. Despite it being summer in the Northern Hemisphere, I was expecting a harsh cold from the people and a full range of difficulties to ensue. The difference is that this time I showed up correctly; mentally prepared, and armed with a bit of knowledge about what I might come up against. Most importantly, my expectations were in the right areas. Expecting smiles and not getting any leads to a feeling of hostility. Expecting hostility and not getting any makes you pleasantly chuffed. Something like this.
At the Russian border I was put into a small room for investigation and interrogation. Let's word it as 'soft questioning' , because it was not that bad after all, and the only reason for the extra questioning was because it was this ‘Westerner’s’ (I have a NZ passport) "first time to Russia." After an hour of friendly chat, a bit of laughter and the recording of my whole life story into a computer, I was let go - the border gates went up and down the other side of the hill I was allowed to go - straight into the strategic ‘enemy’ of the West. The border police weren't so scary. They were only doing their job by following protocol. The best way to deal with that is to remember that they are secondly police officers, and first and foremost, they are ordinary human beings going about life in general. I enjoyed my ‘interrogation’, and accepted it as my first glimpse into the mood and psychology of Mother Russia and its employees. Besides, having your biography written, and translated, is generally something to be proud of (haha). And with that done, off into the North Caucasus I went on this wet and foggy late August afternoon.
*
The Remarkable North Caucasus – Volatility amidst Beauty
“Red flakes of paint peel off a fence in a field
Of changing thrones and shifting boundary stones that yield
The right to steer but not interfere,
It’s evident
That the weapons they thought were heaven-sent
Were from the neighbor trying to stay relevant.”
This is a poem I found in the Lonely Planet travel guide to the north Caucasus region of Russia – an area with a hostile reputation across the board for being fiery and fierce. The first five regions I passed through were in fact separate republics within Russia. Small in size, close together, and starkly different their people are. A cluster of different religions, languages and cultures, all with a history of warring, and conquering and slaughtering by neighbours and large far away empires. No wonder the people still harbour fire in their souls. The poem sums it up; across history it has been do or die!. You still feel it when you are driving with them…
Vladikavkaz in the Republic of North Ossetia was the first stop has a more Russian feel and is Orthodox Christian. Then came Muslim Ingushetia, just up the road. Pity that most of the more interesting Ingush and Ossetian mountainous areas are still off limits for tourists and require special permits to enter. I heard that the permit takes two months to organize, and that is out of the question when you are aiming at crossing the 4600m+ mountain passes on the Pamir Highway before winter falls. Then there was the former war torn Republic of Chechnya - fiercely independent, extremely traditional, and strictly Muslim, to the point where men do not even wear short pants. No trousers for women either, although shortish dresses seemed to be deemed appropriate (and no requirement for headscarves) – rather unique, I thought, as most Muslim places I had been to were, for women, either cover up or don’t. Chechnya’s mountain lakes and ancient combat towers were intriguing to drive past, whilst not requiring special government permission to enter either, so of course, back up the hills I went. Then, there was mountainous Dagestan, where, according to the British government’s travel safety advisory, is an area that should not be visited under any circumstances for security reasons. I went. Then came Kalmykia several hundred kilometres up the Caspian sea coast; a serene, flat and empty Buddhist republic that still exists on the empty grasslands since the times when the Mongols raided the region. All this, in a small region, in two weeks before I arrived in the Russian city of Astrakhan, 50kms from the Kazakh border. What diversity!
This melange of relatively unheard of places, an unknown crossroads of Europe, Asia and the Middle East, made me conjure up a new complicated world in my mind, forcing me to contemplate what a life of volatility may be like, and enter a world with more unpredictability than the average person may be used to. And what do you do in a world like this? How do you act under such circumstances? What are you to expect from daily life? In Dagestan, arguably the most 'dangerous' republic is where shopkeepers gave me fruit for free, and a restaurant would not accept me paying for a kebab. Does that mean that the worst can bring out the best in people? Does it mean that very small acts of kindness and generosity become more important? I believe so. I have observed amongst my students the exact opposite: an abundance of money and protection (hence stability) often bringing out the worst in them... A little bit of difficulty and unpredictability does have some positive impacts – my students function very well under such circumstances. Too much of it of course is catastrophic – just dig into some Caucasian history books.
As a whole, these republics all felt remarkably safe, but in Chechnya I sensed an Islamic fanaticism in the air which brought up uneasy thoughts. There were the ‘Allahu Akbar’ signs around the place (which is something you do not want to hear on the streets in certain parts of the world for obvious reasons, especially as a Westerner). There were even anti-terrorism billboards on the sides of the newly built motorways, meaning that Islamic fanaticism is obviously attractive to the occasional wayward Chechen or two. However, what made me feel a bit uneasy were cars speeding up and down the main roads in lines with green Islamic flags hanging out their windows. Allah knows what that was all about – I definitely do not, but this parade felt a bit rough, a bit suspect. Nothing bad happened, but news broadcasts of Islamic terrorists came to mind. The mere word ‘Chechnya’ started to circulate in my head as I drove alongside them, and that is the function of the brain and memory serving their purpose: allowing for a bit of nerves to creep in and say: “This is a situation of possible danger”. Instincts kick in. The brain’s senses are activated to heighten alertness, thus trying to increase your chances of survival.
In reality, ‘survival’ was not a problem. The likelihood of having a car accident with these Islamic fanatics was still far higher than being a victim of terrorism, but previous experience with similar negative behaviour tells you to be afraid and run. For the most part, fear is entirely unnecessary, but your brain does not take the chance. And that is basically how fear and survival instincts work together in tandem to keep you plodding along. It is a bit of a pity sometimes to know that the brain’s survival reflexes prioritizes keeping you around rather than prioritize the reasons for which you actually exist on this earth. A rather large number of people never cease to be routinely cheated by their brains, thus, leading to many less-than-satisfactory lives. These individuals persist to exist all around us, and all of us can name several. I guess, to the brain, it means that if you at least exist, then you still have the capabilities to be of use to the world. It goes to show how primitive we still are, and how a bit of study about human psychology and biology can be of great use to get you past such thoughts and actions, or lack thereof.
While travelling, it is always a highlight to meet new people, talk to the locals and other traveller you meet along the road. Since the North Caucasus region is not such a well-known, or easily accessible, area for foreign travellers, most of the people I had the chance to converse with were Russian backpackers and cyclists. Despite these travellers physically being in the region and not having encountered any dangers themselves, I could see that they have the same psychological reactions while having discussions about the region – they harboured an ever so slight bit of weariness within. Not only has the Russian government instilled military checkpoints everywhere along the main roads of these regions, but the average person tends to be wary at the slight mention of ‘Chechnya’ and ‘Dagestan’ – and fair enough. There are historical and cultural reasons for this. It just goes to show that humans all suffer from the same hard-to-die fears and instincts. You could liken the situation to this: a scenario where people quiver at the thought of snakes despite never having ever encountered a snake in their life. That is my grandma. She is terrified of snakes and there is not even a snake in New Zealand. This is because humans have feared death from snakes from over millennia. Fear lives on, from generation to generation in the deepest chambers of the mind, and history and culture play a bigger part in your life decisions that you would ever imagine. It is worth noting, and reminding yourself of this. Organise your thoughts and emotions clearly, to avoid enslaving yourself to the fear trap.
All in all, it is a fascinating area well worth the effort to get to – scenically beautiful, culturally diverse, historically rich, topped off with hospitable, passionate locals who will eagerly welcome you. I will let the photos do the speaking.
*
Kazakhstan and the Kazakh Steppe – The Beauty of Nothingness
Oh, the boredom, the nothingness. The dry vastness. The parched emptiness. The arid flatness. Dust, sand and earth that migrates in the wind or when stirred by human movement, or that of hoofed animals. The occasional river crisscrosses the dry, yellow grasslands and serves as a drinking point for small herds of camels, horses, sheep or cows. No mountains. No trees. And that is all I encountered for six long days.
It is quite something to experience nothing much. With very little distraction you have more time to be in contact with yourself. The lack of stuff for the eye means more time for meditative thought. It can also be quite fascinating to notice how physically small you are when up against something so massive as the Kazakh Steppe. And how hugely complicated and impressive your thoughts can be when sand and soil is just so plain simple. It is also nice to be reminded how wonderful a tree is, and how useful they can be when the sun is outdoing everything else that inhabits this type of ungenerous environment. In a couple of months, it will be white and all under snow; even more plain, so lap it up while you can!
It is worth the effort to cross such a massive piece of nothingness. Particularly worth it when petrol is so cheap in Kazakhstan. The biggest irritant, more so than dust and potholes, is the police that are everywhere monitoring your speed, ensuring that a) you get to where you are going safely, and b) that you surely do get your six days-worth of clear-minded reflection of life, as you will be driving very slowly. While avoiding the occasional crater in the middle of the road, you will definitely still be more interested in avoiding the high-tech speed radars. The police are well-equipped and they are EVERYWHERE waiting for your slightest mistakes to fatten their pockets. The problem is the lack of distractions means it is also easy to go too far into thought and not realize that you are going a perfectly safe 90km, around a 70km empty bend in the middle of nowhere (like me) and bang! There you go! Police lights go on and he does a U-turn and there is you, pulling over to the side of the road, wondering whether you should feel like a criminal or a victim. And then you start getting psychologically ready to put across your case, while the policeman is walking up behind you. The instant fine costs 20,000 tenge ($54/370元), and shall be paid to the bank during working hours, leaving you to have to hang out in some town till the bank opens. But a little sit in the police car and the policemen’s creative renaming of the police car as a ‘bank’ meant that could get me back on my merry way much quicker. The policemen shook my hand and said “my drugy” (“we are friends” in Russian). And with the apparent $10 friendship fee, off I went, remembering to go the preposterous and monotonous 70km through these types of pointless speed-enforced areas when required.
That aside, the good thing lesson is when you have less, you tend to appreciate everything else more. That was made clear when I finally arrived in Turkestan, an ancient Silk Road city in the south of Kazakhstan with its impressive Persian architecture. This was a real jewel after the grueling crossing of the steppe. Once again, I will let some photos do the speaking.
*
Appreciation and Admiration for the World – A Foundation for Aiming High
Of course, apart from seeing the sights and scenery, some of the other main points of a journey are to experience more about what our world has to offer, to understand the human beings that inhabit it, to observe the lives they all live, to be exposed to the plethora of angles to approach life, and to figure out better ways for you to navigate and adapt to the complexity of the world. Let me be clear: this world has a lot to offer the individual, as much as he or she may need for a lifetime; there is no shortage of anything here. A physical trip (i.e. the itinerary) may often be automatically categorized by the brain as lasting within a time span; limited to a specific period of time or number of days, weeks, months or years. However, the abstract parts of the trip (i.e. getting a sample what the world is all about) lasts a lifetime, with this playing itself out in the mind and soul for well after the trip is over. You can trust that memory will do its job in this area; it will hold dear what you have tasted, despite most likely eventually forgetting names, dates and locations and other specifics of the trip that are not important for your future survival. The brain believes it has no space to waste, obviously.
This deeper glimpse into the surplus of alternative ways of tackling this world (and yourself) resulting through travel resonates in a form of craving in the soul for reachable yet untouchable destinations and experiences. This acts as a type reasoning between you and life itself, becoming a form of motivation to taste more of it and become more connected with it. In the mind, it is spoken something like this: the world is there, not far enough to be impossible to reach, but far enough to require some sort of effort in order to obtain – and that is the magic balance that keeps people ‘on the road’ even though the body may be stationery. This is where you want to aim at being. Excited by where you have been (mentally or physically), content in the moment hanging between past and future, and dreaming of those almost-touchable experiences that lie within your future efforts. There is a reason why travel is a sort of addiction. ‘Having caught the travel bug’ is how it can be referred to in English.
Appreciating and admiring the world, and learning to work all its brilliance and disasters in your favour leads to very attractive destinations – not in the physical sense of on-the-road travel to nice places, but as a psychological tool you have ready to pull out and use to rebuild any parts of life that may be broken. Those types of skills are a true key to happiness and peace. Let the great things you have done, and know you are capable of doing, serve you as an support stick as you advance through life.
Hopefully it will be this that propels me forward along the Silk Road, following in the footsteps of the world’s great explorers, and eventually over that mammoth of a mountain range that still lies ahead. The Great Pamir Highway awaits.
Russian mercenary group revolt against Moscow fizzles but exposes vulnerabilities
By The Associated Press
today
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the owner of the Wagner Group military company, right, sits inside a military vehicle posing for a selfie photo with a local civilian on a street in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, Saturday, June 24, 2023, prior to leaving an area of the headquarters of the Southern Military District. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Prigozhin's troops who joined him in the uprising will not face prosecution and those who did not will be offered contracts by the Defense Ministry. After the deal was reached Saturday, Prigozhin ordered his troops to halt their march on Moscow and retreat to field camps in Ukraine, where they have been fighting alongside Russian troops. (AP Photo)
The greatest challenge to Russian President Vladimir Putin in his more than two decades in power fizzled out after the rebellious mercenary commander who ordered his troops to march on Moscow abruptly reached a deal with the Kremlin to go into exile and sounded the retreat.
The brief revolt, though, exposed vulnerabilities among Russian government forces, with Wagner Group soldiers under the command of Yevgeny Prigozhin able to move unimpeded into the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and advance hundreds of kilometers (miles) toward Moscow. The Russian military scrambled to defend Russia’s capital.
Under the deal announced Saturday by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, Prigozhin will go to neighboring Belarus, which has supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Charges against him of mounting an armed rebellion will be dropped.
The government also said it would not prosecute Wagner fighters who took part, while those who did not join in were to be offered contracts by the Defense Ministry. Prigozhin ordered his troops back to their field camps in Ukraine, where they have been fighting alongside Russian regular soldiers.
Putin had vowed earlier to punish those behind the armed uprising led by his onetime protege. In a televised speech to the nation, he called the rebellion a “betrayal” and “treason.”
In allowing Prigozhin and his forces to go free, Peskov said, Putin’s “highest goal” was “to avoid bloodshed and internal confrontation with unpredictable results.”
Some observers said Putin’s strongman image has taken a hit.
“Putin has been diminished for all time by this affair,” former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst said on CNN.
Moscow had braced for the arrival of the Wagner forces by erecting checkpoints with armored vehicles and troops on the city’s southern edge. About 3,000 Chechen soldiers were pulled from fighting in Ukraine and rushed there early Saturday, state television in Chechnya reported. Russian troops armed with machine guns put up checkpoints on Moscow’s southern outskirts. Crews dug up sections of highways to slow the march.
Wagner troops advanced to just 200 kilometers (120 miles) from Moscow, according to Prigozhin. But after the deal was struck, Prigozhin announced that he had decided to retreat to avoid “shedding Russian blood.”
Prigozhin had demanded the ouster of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, whom Prigohzhin has long criticized in withering terms for his conduct of the 16-month-long war in Ukraine. On Friday, he accused forces under Shoigu’s command of attacking Wagner camps and killing “a huge number of our comrades.”
If Putin were to agree to Shoigu’s ouster, it could be politically damaging for the president after he branded Prigozhin a backstabbing traitor.
The U.S. had intelligence that Prigozhin had been building up his forces near the border with Russia for some time. That conflicts with Prigozhin’s claim that his rebellion was a response to an attack on his camps in Ukraine on Friday by the Russian military.
In announcing the rebellion, Prigozhin accused Russian forces of attacking the Wagner camps in Ukraine with rockets, helicopter gunships and artillery. He alleged that Gen. Valery Gerasimov, chief of the General Staff, ordered the attacks following a meeting with Shoigu in which they decided to destroy the military contractor.
The Defense Ministry denied attacking the camps.
Congressional leaders were briefed on the Wagner buildup earlier last week, a person familiar with the matter said. The person was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity. The U.S. intelligence briefing was first reported by CNN.
Early Saturday, Prigozhin’s private army appeared to control the military headquarters in Rostov-on-Don, a city 660 miles (over 1,000 kilometers) south of Moscow, which runs Russian operations in Ukraine, Britain’s Ministry of Defense said.
Russian media reported that several helicopters and a military communications plane were downed by Wagner troops. Russia’s Defense Ministry has not commented.
After the agreement de-escalated tensions, video from Rostov-on-Don posted on Russian messaging app channels showed people cheering Wagner troops as they departed. Prigozhin was riding in an SUV followed by a large truck, and people greeted him and some ran to shake his hand. The regional governor later said that all of the troops had left the city.
Wagner troops and equipment also were in Lipetsk province, about 360 kilometers (225 miles) south of Moscow.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin declared Monday a non-working day for most residents as part of the heightened security, a measure that remained in effect even after the retreat.
Ukrainians hoped the Russian infighting would create opportunities for their army to take back territory seized by Russian forces.
“These events will have been of great comfort to the Ukrainian government and the military,” said Ben Barry, senior fellow for land warfare at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He said that even with a deal, Putin’s position has probably been weakened.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said late Saturday, shortly before Prigozhin announced his retreat, that the march exposed weakness in the Kremlin and “showed all Russian bandits, mercenaries, oligarchs” that it is easy to capture Russian cities “and, probably, arsenals.”
Wagner troops have played a crucial role in the Ukraine war, capturing the eastern city of Bakhmut, an area where the bloodiest and longest battles have taken place. But Prigozhin has increasingly criticized the military brass, accusing it of incompetence and of starving his troops of munitions.
The 62-year-old Prigozhin, a former convict, has longstanding ties to Putin and won lucrative Kremlin catering contracts that earned him the nickname “Putin’s chef.”
He and a dozen other Russian nationals were charged in the United States with operating a covert social media campaign aimed at fomenting discord ahead of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election victory. Wagner has sent military contractors to Libya, Syria, several African countries and eventually Ukraine.
___
Associated Press writers Danica Kirka in London, and Nomaan Merchant in Washington, contributed.
Here are two of my latest before putting the final finish on them.
The woods used are black limba, maple, chechen, and the orange wood for which I forgot the name.
A weapons prohibition sign and a female crack addic from Eastern Europe at the Leopoldplatz underground station.
Leopoldplatz in Berlin's Wedding district is an area notorious for its illegal drug scene. The dealers are Chechens.
In 2023, there were 484 violent crimes here. In June 2025, methadone doctor Wolfgang Conzelmann was murdered.
www.bild.de/regional/berlin/bild-report-vom-leopoldplatz-...
Created by Sergei Mosin... yadda yadda yadda. 7.62x54r... yadda yadda yadda. This was the first design on a weapon that lasted almost 100 years on this earth in military duty alone... not to mention collecting. This is the 1891 version. The first version. I'm making the other versions then i'm going to put them all down at once. This rifle design lasted until 1930 where it was upgraded to be the 91/30 (which will be made)... but next is the 1907 carbine (i think thats what it is). Then onto the 91/30. This is a Russian rifle for those of you who dont know (but how can you not? :P)
Ref pic: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/02/M91.JPG
You know, it looks a little odd with the enormously long handguard... BUT NO FEAR! :D cuz thats how its spost tah bee! :D
Tell meh what you think!
Sooo what wars has the Mosin been in!? :D
Boxer Rebellion
Russo-Japanese War
World War I
Finnish Civil War
Russian Revolution (1917)
Russian Civil War
Turkish War of Independence
Chinese Civil War
Spanish Civil War
Second Sino-Japanese War
Winter War
Continuation War
World War II
Great Patriotic War
First Indochina War
Korean War
Cuban Revolution
Vietnam War
Laotian Civil War
Cambodian Civil War
Cambodian–Vietnamese War
Thai–Laotian Border War
Afghan civil war
Soviet War in Afghanistan
Yugoslav Wars
First Chechen War
Second Chechen War
War in Afghanistan (2001–present)
Iraq War
29 wars... And some of you may be wondering. "The iraq war!? WHATTTT!?"... yes this is used in modern day combat by insurgents. They use any weapon possible. And relics are very common. They are easy to get and cheap... especially mosins. I'd like to buy a mosin that was used in modern combat. But this is most commonly found in its sniper rifle form. Not many would like to buy a rifle when they can buy an AK for the same price (in iraq its like the same price).
Russian mercenary group revolt against Moscow fizzles but exposes vulnerabilities
By The Associated Press
today
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the owner of the Wagner Group military company, right, sits inside a military vehicle posing for a selfie photo with a local civilian on a street in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, Saturday, June 24, 2023, prior to leaving an area of the headquarters of the Southern Military District. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Prigozhin's troops who joined him in the uprising will not face prosecution and those who did not will be offered contracts by the Defense Ministry. After the deal was reached Saturday, Prigozhin ordered his troops to halt their march on Moscow and retreat to field camps in Ukraine, where they have been fighting alongside Russian troops. (AP Photo)
The greatest challenge to Russian President Vladimir Putin in his more than two decades in power fizzled out after the rebellious mercenary commander who ordered his troops to march on Moscow abruptly reached a deal with the Kremlin to go into exile and sounded the retreat.
The brief revolt, though, exposed vulnerabilities among Russian government forces, with Wagner Group soldiers under the command of Yevgeny Prigozhin able to move unimpeded into the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and advance hundreds of kilometers (miles) toward Moscow. The Russian military scrambled to defend Russia’s capital.
Under the deal announced Saturday by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, Prigozhin will go to neighboring Belarus, which has supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Charges against him of mounting an armed rebellion will be dropped.
The government also said it would not prosecute Wagner fighters who took part, while those who did not join in were to be offered contracts by the Defense Ministry. Prigozhin ordered his troops back to their field camps in Ukraine, where they have been fighting alongside Russian regular soldiers.
Putin had vowed earlier to punish those behind the armed uprising led by his onetime protege. In a televised speech to the nation, he called the rebellion a “betrayal” and “treason.”
In allowing Prigozhin and his forces to go free, Peskov said, Putin’s “highest goal” was “to avoid bloodshed and internal confrontation with unpredictable results.”
Some observers said Putin’s strongman image has taken a hit.
“Putin has been diminished for all time by this affair,” former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst said on CNN.
Moscow had braced for the arrival of the Wagner forces by erecting checkpoints with armored vehicles and troops on the city’s southern edge. About 3,000 Chechen soldiers were pulled from fighting in Ukraine and rushed there early Saturday, state television in Chechnya reported. Russian troops armed with machine guns put up checkpoints on Moscow’s southern outskirts. Crews dug up sections of highways to slow the march.
Wagner troops advanced to just 200 kilometers (120 miles) from Moscow, according to Prigozhin. But after the deal was struck, Prigozhin announced that he had decided to retreat to avoid “shedding Russian blood.”
Prigozhin had demanded the ouster of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, whom Prigohzhin has long criticized in withering terms for his conduct of the 16-month-long war in Ukraine. On Friday, he accused forces under Shoigu’s command of attacking Wagner camps and killing “a huge number of our comrades.”
If Putin were to agree to Shoigu’s ouster, it could be politically damaging for the president after he branded Prigozhin a backstabbing traitor.
The U.S. had intelligence that Prigozhin had been building up his forces near the border with Russia for some time. That conflicts with Prigozhin’s claim that his rebellion was a response to an attack on his camps in Ukraine on Friday by the Russian military.
In announcing the rebellion, Prigozhin accused Russian forces of attacking the Wagner camps in Ukraine with rockets, helicopter gunships and artillery. He alleged that Gen. Valery Gerasimov, chief of the General Staff, ordered the attacks following a meeting with Shoigu in which they decided to destroy the military contractor.
The Defense Ministry denied attacking the camps.
Congressional leaders were briefed on the Wagner buildup earlier last week, a person familiar with the matter said. The person was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity. The U.S. intelligence briefing was first reported by CNN.
Early Saturday, Prigozhin’s private army appeared to control the military headquarters in Rostov-on-Don, a city 660 miles (over 1,000 kilometers) south of Moscow, which runs Russian operations in Ukraine, Britain’s Ministry of Defense said.
Russian media reported that several helicopters and a military communications plane were downed by Wagner troops. Russia’s Defense Ministry has not commented.
After the agreement de-escalated tensions, video from Rostov-on-Don posted on Russian messaging app channels showed people cheering Wagner troops as they departed. Prigozhin was riding in an SUV followed by a large truck, and people greeted him and some ran to shake his hand. The regional governor later said that all of the troops had left the city.
Wagner troops and equipment also were in Lipetsk province, about 360 kilometers (225 miles) south of Moscow.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin declared Monday a non-working day for most residents as part of the heightened security, a measure that remained in effect even after the retreat.
Ukrainians hoped the Russian infighting would create opportunities for their army to take back territory seized by Russian forces.
“These events will have been of great comfort to the Ukrainian government and the military,” said Ben Barry, senior fellow for land warfare at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He said that even with a deal, Putin’s position has probably been weakened.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said late Saturday, shortly before Prigozhin announced his retreat, that the march exposed weakness in the Kremlin and “showed all Russian bandits, mercenaries, oligarchs” that it is easy to capture Russian cities “and, probably, arsenals.”
Wagner troops have played a crucial role in the Ukraine war, capturing the eastern city of Bakhmut, an area where the bloodiest and longest battles have taken place. But Prigozhin has increasingly criticized the military brass, accusing it of incompetence and of starving his troops of munitions.
The 62-year-old Prigozhin, a former convict, has longstanding ties to Putin and won lucrative Kremlin catering contracts that earned him the nickname “Putin’s chef.”
He and a dozen other Russian nationals were charged in the United States with operating a covert social media campaign aimed at fomenting discord ahead of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election victory. Wagner has sent military contractors to Libya, Syria, several African countries and eventually Ukraine.
___
Associated Press writers Danica Kirka in London, and Nomaan Merchant in Washington, contributed.
Russia had used (despite some teething problems) with a great level of success the Self-Propelled Anti-Aircraft vehicle family ZSU-23, however it lacked the teeth to penetrate the newer generation of aircraft the West was introducing.
Anti-Aircraft missile systems are successful in their role, however it can have draw backs, such as a slower engagement time, engaging lower flying aircraft and inability to be used in other roles (during the Chechen War’s the high elevation of the SP-AA vehicles meant they could attack embedded enemy troops in high level buildings in built up area’s that other vehicles couldn’t).
Developed in the 1970’s by the Russian KBP Instrument Design Bureau, the system was designated Tunguska and equipped with both dual 2A38 twin 30mm auto-cannons and 8 × 9M311 missile launchers, making the vehicle the most capable SPG-AA vehicle in the world.
It was officially accepted into service on 8 September 1982 and the initial version designated 2K22/2S6, with four missiles in the ready to fire position (two on each side). The Tunguska entered into limited service from 1984 when the first batteries were delivered to the army.
2K22M1 (1988): Improved version with the 2S6M1 combat vehicle on a GM-5975 chassis, using the 9M311-M1 missile (range: 10 km) and with an improved fire control system. Passed state trials in April 2003 and entered service with the Russian armed forces a year later
The two 30mm auto cannons fire either HE-T (High Explosive Tracer) and HE-I (High Explosive Incendiary) rounds at a combined rate of 3900 to 5000 rounds per minute. The cannons are fired alternatively, achieving bursts of between 83 and 250 rounds depending on the target. Their effective range is 0.2 to 4km, at an altitude of 4km. The cannons can be elevated and depressed to +87 to -10 degrees and as such can be used to engage ground as well as aerial targets.
The 2K22 can fire its cannons in two primary modes of operation, radar and optical, in radar mode the target tracking is fully automatic, with the guns aimed using data from the radar. In optical mode the gunner tracks the target through the 1A29 stabilized sight.
Four launchers are mounted on either side of the turret and fire the 9M311 missile family, which can engage targets at ranges of 2.4 to 8km at an altitude of 3.5km. The Tunguska-M1 uses the improved 9M311-M1 missile with an increased range of 10km. The complete missile is around 2.56m long with a weight of 57kg.
The gunner guides the missile on to its target via a ×8 magnification 1A29 stabilized sight. The tracking radar is used to send radio commands to the missile, making Tunguska a semi-automatic, radio command, with optical line of sight (SACLOS) system.
Once the missile is guided to within 5m of the target, an active laser or radio fuse is triggered blowing the rods in the warhead of the missile into fragments, which shred the skin of the enemy aircraft and hopefully strike an explosive element, which cooks off and destroys the aircraft.
Chechen Republic. Germenchuk, the ethnographic complex "Shira-Yurt"
Герменчук. Архитектурно-этнографический музей "Шира-Юрт"
INGUSHETIA, RUSSIA - AUGUST 22: (RUSSIA OUT) Actress Angelina Jolie visits Bella refugee camp August 22, 2003 in Ingushetia, near the Chechen border in Russia's North Caucasus region. Jolie, a Goodwill Ambassador for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, arrived August 22 in North Caucasus region. (Photo by Tanya Makeeva-Pool/Getty Images)
There were rows upon rows of vendors all around Chechen Itza, selling all kinds of Maya-themed artifacts, including these circular riffs on the Mayan calendar.
Some peshmergas take me to the front lines of the war against ISIS. I find myself in the Taza area, just south of Kirkuk, on the road to Baghdad.
According to them, very few journalists come here. Some even said that I was the only was they saw. Nonetheless, it is a key strategic location. It is very dangerous there since Kirkuk is divided: Kurds in the north, ISIS in the south. All along the front lines you can see different units roaming about little traditional houses. Some are kept by old Kurdish vets from the 1980s wars.
Many vets have returned to war, despite being well past middle-aged and having children and grandchildren. Some even behind comfortable lives in Europe to come back, like a Swiss colonel I met. For them, it is their duty to fight for their region. Despite being autonomous and having a large secessionist movement, Kurdistan is not recognized as a state distinct from Iraq. “Some terrorists come along and now the whole world calls them the ‘Islamic State’,” complains one peshmerga, “For decades we have been trying to make the state of Kurdistan and we’ve gotten nothing!”
They have very few weapons, most of them are pre-Cold War AK47s. Some even date back to 1960. They still work, but the Kurdish forces ask for more efficient guns since ISIS has the latest weapons taken (or given) from the Iraqi army who in turn was supplied by coalition forces.
Many vets have only one working eye. The other was lost in previous wars. Once night falls, it becomes very difficult to monitor the 1000km long border. They don’t even have night vision equipment.
Last week it rained for 5 days, and it was impossible to see or hear anything. Some ISIS guys tried to gain territory, but the Kurds successfully fought them off. Their 4 wheel drives were stuck in the mud while ISIS’s brand new hummers were able to move about without issue. From the front line you can see ISIS flags. Since they told me to pack light, I didn’t bring a zoom lens. Sorry! You can see the smoke from their kitchen and even see men running from house to house.
ISIS is only 500 meters from the Kurdish position but nobody seems afraid. Peshmerga know that death is part of their fate, and even if they look like an army from another century, they will defend themselves and their country to the very end. For them, it is the highest honor to die for Kurdistan.
They protect the Baghdad road, but a few weeks ago lost it. After heavy fighting, they regained it, killing 3 Chechen ISIS fighters in the process.
Since peshmerga don’t have armored cars, it is very dangerous for them to go around safely.
The car I took to go on the front lines was very slow and made in the 80s. If we were chased by ISIS cars, we wouldn’t have stood a chance. In one day, all the materiel I saw included AK47s, a tank, an RPG, and a few gun old machines. Even if the pehsmergas say that this equipment works well, they are disappointed not to receive new ones, as Europe and USA promised.
The day after my visit, France made lot of bombings in the area, as ISIS was too close. Peshmergas take a lot of pictures, not only for souvenirs, but also to fight ISIS on the new front: social media.
They fear the roads they do not know well as ISIS pays the local farmers to put mines. Even in times of war, peshmergas are among the most welcoming people in the world. They regularly offer food and drinks.
When it was time for me to go back to the safety of Erbil, circumstances changed. The north road was closed because of an ISIS attack. The only way out was to send me through the south road that crossed Kirkuk. Let’s just say that safety there was not ideal. I had to hide my camera, and we crossed Kirkuk with an escort of armed peshmergas and a civilian car.
The soldiers were all nervous since Kirkuk is very dangerous, especially at the check points. As soon as a car was driving next to ours for too long, they were shouting at the driver to go away.
If a man was crossing the road too slowly, they threatened to hit him. These methods, employed by ISIS suicide bombers, have claimed the lives of hundred in Kirkuk. Once on the Kurdish side, they found a Kurdish taxi driver to bring me safely back to Erbil.
© Eric Lafforgue
Some peshmergas take me to the front lines of the war against ISIS. I find myself in the Taza area, just south of Kirkuk, on the road to Baghdad.
According to them, very few journalists come here. Some even said that I was the only was they saw. Nonetheless, it is a key strategic location. It is very dangerous there since Kirkuk is divided: Kurds in the north, ISIS in the south. All along the front lines you can see different units roaming about little traditional houses. Some are kept by old Kurdish vets from the 1980s wars.
Many vets have returned to war, despite being well past middle-aged and having children and grandchildren. Some even behind comfortable lives in Europe to come back, like a Swiss colonel I met. For them, it is their duty to fight for their region. Despite being autonomous and having a large secessionist movement, Kurdistan is not recognized as a state distinct from Iraq. “Some terrorists come along and now the whole world calls them the ‘Islamic State’,” complains one peshmerga, “For decades we have been trying to make the state of Kurdistan and we’ve gotten nothing!”
They have very few weapons, most of them are pre-Cold War AK47s. Some even date back to 1960. They still work, but the Kurdish forces ask for more efficient guns since ISIS has the latest weapons taken (or given) from the Iraqi army who in turn was supplied by coalition forces.
Many vets have only one working eye. The other was lost in previous wars. Once night falls, it becomes very difficult to monitor the 1000km long border. They don’t even have night vision equipment.
Last week it rained for 5 days, and it was impossible to see or hear anything. Some ISIS guys tried to gain territory, but the Kurds successfully fought them off. Their 4 wheel drives were stuck in the mud while ISIS’s brand new hummers were able to move about without issue. From the front line you can see ISIS flags. Since they told me to pack light, I didn’t bring a zoom lens. Sorry! You can see the smoke from their kitchen and even see men running from house to house.
ISIS is only 500 meters from the Kurdish position but nobody seems afraid. Peshmerga know that death is part of their fate, and even if they look like an army from another century, they will defend themselves and their country to the very end. For them, it is the highest honor to die for Kurdistan.
They protect the Baghdad road, but a few weeks ago lost it. After heavy fighting, they regained it, killing 3 Chechen ISIS fighters in the process.
Since peshmerga don’t have armored cars, it is very dangerous for them to go around safely.
The car I took to go on the front lines was very slow and made in the 80s. If we were chased by ISIS cars, we wouldn’t have stood a chance. In one day, all the materiel I saw included AK47s, a tank, an RPG, and a few gun old machines. Even if the pehsmergas say that this equipment works well, they are disappointed not to receive new ones, as Europe and USA promised.
The day after my visit, France made lot of bombings in the area, as ISIS was too close. Peshmergas take a lot of pictures, not only for souvenirs, but also to fight ISIS on the new front: social media.
They fear the roads they do not know well as ISIS pays the local farmers to put mines. Even in times of war, peshmergas are among the most welcoming people in the world. They regularly offer food and drinks.
When it was time for me to go back to the safety of Erbil, circumstances changed. The north road was closed because of an ISIS attack. The only way out was to send me through the south road that crossed Kirkuk. Let’s just say that safety there was not ideal. I had to hide my camera, and we crossed Kirkuk with an escort of armed peshmergas and a civilian car.
The soldiers were all nervous since Kirkuk is very dangerous, especially at the check points. As soon as a car was driving next to ours for too long, they were shouting at the driver to go away.
If a man was crossing the road too slowly, they threatened to hit him. These methods, employed by ISIS suicide bombers, have claimed the lives of hundred in Kirkuk. Once on the Kurdish side, they found a Kurdish taxi driver to bring me safely back to Erbil.
© Eric Lafforgue