The New Great Game Round-Up #40

The Great Game Round-Up brings you the latest newsworthy developments regarding Central Asia and the Caucasus region. We document the struggle for influence, power, hegemony and profits between a U.S.-dominated NATO, its GCC proxies, Russia, China and other regional players.

Considering all the terrorism fear-mongering in the run-up to the Sochi Olympics, the last few days in Russia's North Caucasus have been remarkably uneventful. Besides the usual anti-terror operation in Dagestan, resulting in three dead insurgents, and Tengiz Guketlov, terrorist leader from Kabardino-Balkaria, claiming responsibility for the six killings in the Stavropol region last month, there is not much to report. Terror mastermind Prince Bandar bin Sultan is apparently not going to act on his threats because he is busy supplying the al-Qaeda mercenaries in Syria with more anti-aircraft missiles and his go-to guy in the North Caucasus, Doku Umarov, appears to be dead. Moreover, Russia's “ring of steel” is quite effective. But not everybody is happy with the Russian security operation:

U.S. feeling shut out of Russian security operation at Sochi

U.S. intelligence officials are frustrated that the Russian government is withholding information about threats to Olympic venues coming from inside Russia, several lawmakers said during talk shows Sunday.

“We aren't getting the kind of cooperation that we'd like from the Russians in terms of their internal threats,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said in an appearance on “Fox News Sunday.”

© Photo Reuters/Sergei Karpukhin

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