From the European Heritage Alliance WWW.EUROHERITAGE.NET

The region of the Crimea (today the southern tip of Ukraine) has acted for nearly a millennium as the buffer zone between the west and north (the Slavic Christian world), and the east and south (the Islamic Turkic world). This geographic volatility has caused the region of modern Ukraine and the Crimea to change hands between various Turkic Islamic (Tatar) armies and those of growing European empires. The endless ethnic conflict between the Turkic peoples and the Slavs (which continues today), as well as the war between the the Slavs' Christian colonial conquest and the Islamic Jihad, are all epitomized in the Crimea and the Eurasian steppes.

Before the Mongol invasion of the 13th century, Central Asia west of Mongolia was populated by Sunni Muslim Turkic peoples collectively and derogatorily called "Tatars" (though today the Tatars themselves have embraced this heritage) who settled in modern Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, the eastern Volga, and southern Siberia. The Tatar Turks were famed for their efforts to raid civilian Christian caravans, though this is probably exaggerated and biased; nonetheless, the Tatars were famed for their corporal will, Islamic piety, and equestrian military prowess. The Tatars were disunited tribal confederations who spoke a language in the Turkish family (today called Tatar), and adhered to the Turkish culture and Islamic faith, as they were of the Turkish race. The Mongol conquest conquered the many Turkic tribes in Central Asia along with the Russian Slavs to the west as part of history's most massive contiguous empire. Instead of simply looting his subjects (and indeed more than 30,000,000 non-Mongol civilians were slaughtered by the Mongols in their short-lived empire), he exploited the equestrian skills of the Turkic peoples by creating vassalized nation-states throughout Central Asia to fuel their need for military regiments. The use of Turkic Muslims by the Mongol invaders is visible today as a legacy, as ethnic Turk nations in Central Asia include Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, whilst ethnic Mongol states include Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan; all are culturally and linguistically Turkic Sunni Muslims because of this heritage. The massive Mongol conquest -- largely with the use of Turkic Muslim soldiers -- forced millions of Slavs in their former unified Russian state of Kievan Rus to flee to the west. These Turkic Tatars settled in these formerly-Russian lands of modern Ukraine and the Volga, having secured a new Turkic empire after the victorious Jihad against the Christian Slavs. The Russian state had been obliterated, its land replaced by Islamic Mujahidin Turks. With the quick collapse of the Mongol Empire into a huge variety of successor states in China, Mongolia, Central Asia, Iran, and central Russia, the Tatar Muslims were divided into a number of "hordes" such as the Blue and White Hordes -- all united under the banner of Sunni Islam. The broken Russian Christian Slavs were busy rallying against invading Teutonic Knights of the German Empire, and gradually worked to coalesce together in the face of constant post-Mongol Jihad, though it would not be until the 16th century that the Slavs began to create a unified Russian empire as a world superpower free of Islamic fighters.

By 1300, the warring Turkic Muslim hordes and their Mongol leaders had coalesced into a unified state of Central Asian Turks, merging the Blue and White Hordes into the Golden Horde first under Berkei Khan. The new superpower -- whose leaders remained ethnic Mongol Shamanist or Buddhist and their population ethnic Turkish Muslims -- quickly annexed excluded Turkic states, engaged in a bloody and brutal Jihad against Christian Russian states, against the Byzantine Greeks, against Poland, and against Lithuania and Hungary. By 1400, the Golden Horde stretched from eastern Poland to East Turkestan (western Mongolia), and from Siberia to northern Turkmenistan. By the reign of sultan Uzbeg Khan (ازبايغ), whose reign ushered in the Golden Horde's golden age, the non-Turkic leaders of the post-Mongol states had formally adopted Sunni Islam as the compulsory religion of all their citizens with the penalty of death. The role of the ethnic Mongol elite gradually collapsed, and the Tatar Muslim population more and more gained authority. With the forced establishment of Islam as the state faith of all Turkic peoples & Tatars, the role of Jihad came to the fore in the many wars against the Christian Slavs of Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, and Russian states. The Golden Horde's conquest and expulsion of the Slavic Christians in modern Ukraine and the Crimea forced millions of Christians to flee to central Europe, causing Slavic states and Hungary in the Balkans to experience a golden age. The Turks of modern Turkey had already entered Anatolia (where Turkey today lies) to the south, where their Jihad expelled the Greek Byzantine settlers in the wake of their mighty horseback armies. The advanced military tactics of the powerful Golden Horde caused millions to suffer death under the blade of their Jihad, making the Golden Horde one of the wealthiest, advanced, and powerful states in Eurasia. The Christian Slavs, expelled from Ukraine (Ruthenia) and the Volga, were far too weak following the Mongol conquest to offer uniform resistance to re-establish their Slavic native statehood.

The Golden Horde suffered a gradual decline towards its end, and its mortal blow was not dealt by revolting Christians nor a uniform Christian crusade, but rather ironically by an awesome Mongol Muslim general to the south. The ethnic Mongol (Uzbek) Sunni Muslim Timur-i-Leng of the Timurid Empire (centered in Uzbek Samarqand and Shi'ia Iran) worked to expand one of the world's greatest empires by slaughtering the Horde's largest armies and burning the Tatar capital. More than 10,000,000 Jews, Christians, and Muslims died under Timur's Jihad, making Samarqand (modern Mongol Uzbekistan) one of the world's most glorious and wealthy cultural centers. The conquest in the 1450s by the Tatars' Muslim rivals caused the Tatar Golden Horde to collapse into civil war, ultimately creating a schism between more than 6 regional sultanates and emirates. One of these breakaway states was that of the Crimean Emirate (or Khanate) to the south of the Russian/Ukrainian Slavs centered along the Crimean peninsula. This is the genesis of the split between the culturally-Turkic Uzbeks, Turkmen, Kazakhs, etc. The collapse of the Islamic Tatar Jihad in civil war allowed the Slavic Ruthenians (Ukrainians), Lithuanians, Poles, and Russians to expand and dominate, causing a golden age in all of the Slavic world. Moskva's (Moscow) Russian kings Ivan the Great and Ivan the Terrible expanded Moscow to include nearly a dozen warring ethnic-Russian states (especially Novgorod, Tver, Pskov, and Yaroslavl) in the new Russian Empire. Ivan the Terrible conquered Tatar Astrakhan and Kazan (modern Tatarstan in Russia), foreshadowing a permanent decline of Islam and the triumph of Orthodoxy. The Muslims were expelled from Slavic lands, and Islam was banned. The new Russian state, which included Ukrainians (but not the Tatar Islamist Crimea to the south) soon stretched from the Arctic to the southern Volga. The hegemony wrought by Islam was quickly replaced by the hegemony of the Christian Slavs, whose colonial conquest eventually conquered more than 60,000,000 Muslims -- nearly all of the Muslims of Central Asia, the Crimea, and the Caucasus. An ironic reversal of the social military history of Eurasia.

The post-Golden Horde emirate of the pre-Slavic Crimea of modern Ukraine functioned thereafter as an independent staunch Islamic Tatar state whose Jihad against the Christian kingdoms continued until its eventual destruction. The wealthy trade of the Black Sea coast allowed this relatively small Mujahidin ("Jihadist") state to thrive. The population became known as Crimean Tatars to distinguish from ethnic Turkic Tatars elsewhere in Central Asia. The Crimea, previously inhabited by Slavic Russians and Ruthenians (Ukrainians) before the Mongol conquest, were now instead Turkic Muslim after the conquest and expulsion of the Golden Horde. The emirate of the Tatars also was able to thrive due to frequent and stable trade alliances with the Turkish Ottoman Empire, the Turkmen horde, the Noghai, and other Tatar states based upon common race and Sunni Muslim faith. But the expansive efforts of the European superpowers and colonial kingdoms marked the end of Tatar power in the pre-Slavic Crimea. The Genoese Catholic Italians colonized Kaffa, modern Yalta, and Azow in the middle 15th century. The Russians had conquered nearly all of Siberia, the Volga, and the Ukrainian steppe, effectively cutting off the sociopolitical link of the Crimean Tatars to their Muslim allies expelled by the Russians. A Christian (Genoese) presence in Turkic Tatar Crimea infuriated their Turkish Ottoman brothers, who promptly invaded the Crimea to save the righteous from the infidels invading from the north. The Crimean Tatars and their emirate became vassals of the Ottomans by the end of the 15th century.

Turkish support of their Tatar brethren allowed the Tatar Jihad to continue, and independence of the Crimea from the Christian Russians was retained until the late 18th century. The brilliant military and political genius of the Swedish czarina of Russia, Katherina the Great, as well as the increasing decline of the Ottomans allowed the Russian superpower (the world's largest empire) to annex the Tatar Crimea from the Ottomans and the Crimean Emirate in 1783. Cut off from Turkish aid and now ruled by the Russians, the Islamic heritage and faith of the Tatars was quickly banned, their mosques burnt (among them some of the oldest in Central Asia), and millions of Tatars all across southern Russia slaughtered or expelled. Tens of thousands of those who survived fled their homes to the Ottoman Empire or Shi'ia Iran (where thousands were additionally slaughtered as infidels for being Sunni) to escape European persecution and to retain submission to Allah instead of convert to the unclean faith of the invaders. Their traditions were marginalized, their women's veils and headscarves banned, Islam forbidden, their language outlawed, and treated as second-class citizens based upon their non-Russian race as Turks (forever the enemy of the Slavs, as seen above). Nonetheless, thousands of Tatars remained in Russian political land and in the Crimea for several centuries until today. The Crimea and its northern frontiers, previously ethnic Slav and then replaced entirely by Turkic Tatar, was once again almost entirely Slavic Ukrainian and Russian once again. Russia would expand to conquer the Uzbek, Kazakh, and other Mongol Muslim tribes in Central Asia by the 1900 under the Alexandrian reign.

The Crimea remained as such until the Communist revolution, when the ethnopolitical situation became complicated. The overthrow of the Russian Empire by the Bolsheviks forced Russia out of the war. A result of the Brest-Litovsk Pact (through which Russia escaped the war) effectively cemented the declaration of independence of non-Slavic Estonia, Latvia, Finland, as well as Slavic Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania. The fact that some ethnic groups or nations achieved independence but others did not incited the Islamic cultures under Russian rule to seek independence, including the Azerbaijani Shi'ia Turks and the Tatars of Russia. The appointment of Premier Joseph Stalin as absolute leader of the Soviet Union spelled the reversal of their independence hopes. The invading Axis powers (Germany, Finland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, etc.) were surprised to find a faithful ally in the Jihadist Tatars, who joined the German SS (Schutzstaffel) and volunteer legions by the hundreds of thousands. The Muslim Tatars hoped to gain independence via their aid to the Fascists, and the leaders of both sides found a natural bond between the Jihadists and the National Socialists due to a mutual hatred for Jews, Communists, as well as the common rejection of Allied secularism and atheism. After the war and the ascension of the Soviet Union to world geographic supremacy, Joseph Stalin expelled virtually every single Muslim, Tatar, and Turk to Kazakhstan -- along with the Volga Germans -- for their collective treacherous anti-Soviet support for the enemy Fascists. The Tatars, once again, were expelled from their homelands in the Eurasian steppes and in the now-Slavic Crimea. Tens of thousands of others were either executed or sent to gulags for mass forced labor in Uzbek camps or in Siberia in southern Russia. Retaliatory reprisals or Jihad by the expelled Muslims was impossible against an enemy that was responsible for the destruction of even the Axis in its entirety.

After the death of Stalin in 1953 and the gradual liberalization of the USSR under Mikhail Gorbachev (and especially the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union), the Muslim Turks, Tatars, and Mongol (Uzbeks, Kazakhs, etc.) cultures were allowed to return to what remained of the Soviet Union. Crimean Tatars returned to the Crimea of the Ukrainian SSR, and Volga Germans fled the Kazakh SSR to West or East Germany based upon ethnic grounds. Such remains today: the now-Slavic Crimea of independent Ukraine is almost entirely Slavic with a tiny minority of Tatars. Officially, only .5% of Ukraine is of the Turkic Tatar race (Source: CIA World Factbook).

The endless ethnic, social, and religious conflict between European Christian cultures and the Jihad of Islamic ones is epitomized in the region of the Crimea, where Christendom was destroyed by the blade of the superior Mujahidin, who successively were destroyed by the Slavs once again.

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