4:26 pm, St. Petersburg time

The leader of a human rights group, Oleg Orlov, has been arrested in Moscow for defaming Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov, who is supported by the government of the Russian Federation. Orlov had earlier made claims linking Kadyrov to assassinations and killings in Chechnya.

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Girls are being "sold like slaves " in Turkey's southeast.

...meanwhile, in the Republic of Ingushetia, located in the north Caucasus region of the Russian Federation, the price paid for kalym, or the amount paid to a bride's father, has more than tripled, up from roughly $400 to $1300.

The price of a buyout from a blood feud has also increased, and now stands at roughly $32,000

While the majority of Ingushetia's residents are Muslim, these practices stem from local customary rule, rather than Islam. During the time of Russian imperial rule, the tsarist state established courts which adjudicated various types of cases (mostly relating to "family law" type matters, such as marriage, divorce, and the division of property) based upon a state-sponsored version of Sharia. In the northern Caucasus and other regions (like the Kazakh steppe), however, local customary law took precedence in these matters.

Today, the Muslim spiritual board of the republic is responsible for setting the rates for things like kalym and blood money, and the spiritual board is connected to the state apparatus. However, many people are able to avoid following the rules set up by the Muslim spiritual board. For example, one way in which people avoid having to pay kalym is by kidnapping brides, or else simply eloping with them.

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Juan Cole comments informedly on outbreak of fighting between Kurds and Arabs in Diyala province.

Since 1991, the Kurdish government has administered three provinces—Dahuk, Arbil, and Sulaymaniayah—in the far north of Iraq. After the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, however, the Iraqi Kurdish government also began making territorial claims upon three ethnically mixed (Kurd and Arab) provinces further south—Nineveh, Kirkuk, and Diyala.

Earlier this year, US soldiers began patrolling the "border" between the areas occupied by Kurdish peshmerga forces and the rest of Iraq, effectively safeguarding the Kurdish government's territorial demands.

As I discussed in an earlier post, such actions run a very real risk of drawing the United States into regional conflicts. Such an event would, of course, give the US government yet another excuse to never leave Iraq, so perhaps this gamble with the lives of American servicemen should not necessarily be seen as unintentional.

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The Turkish government, meanwhile, appears to be hinting at plans to launch a major offensive into northern Iraq, with the Turkish foreign minister, interior minister, and military chief of staff all having reportedly signed off on a plan to attack PKK camps there.

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