Foreign Minister Lavrov ruled out talks with terrorists in Syria, including the Al Nusrah Front, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Sham, and “other al Qaeda branches.” The Foreign Ministry called for the Guantanamo Bay detention center to be closed before the end of President Obama’s term. A UK threat assessment warned that terrorist attacks by the Caucasus Emirate are “very likely” to occur before or during the Sochi Olympics, but that Sochi itself would be hard to target. The Caucasus Emirate claimed to have killed at least two policemen and injured dozens of others in a bomb attack on a Makhachkala casino. In a Jan. 24 message, al Qaeda emir Ayman al Zawahiri praised Chechen jihadists as models of “steadfastness” for Islamists in Egypt and Tunisia.
