The Ginger Jihadi Commander Of IS

[Little Red Wagon Repairman]

I see this character all the time and was curious about him. He goes by Abu Omar al-Shishani but his real name is Tarkhan Batirashvili. His father is Orthodox Christian and his mother a Muslim Kist (an ethnic Chechen subgroup from Georgia's Pankisi Gorge) of the Melkhi clan. He was a Sergeant in the Georgian army, was a veteran of the 2008 Russo-Georgian War, then discharged from the Georgian military, and after became a jihadist. Here's some other stuff.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Oma...a:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&channel=rcs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Omar_al-Shishani
http://www.businessinsider.com/this-is-the-commander-responsible-for-isiss-advances-2014-10

Batirashvili was never decorated for his military service. He was due to be promoted to become an officer, but in 2010 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. After spending several months in a military hospital, he was discharged on medical grounds. He tried and failed to re-enlist. Upon returning home, he was unable to secure work in the local police force. Around this time, his mother also died of cancer. According to his father, he became "very disillusioned".

According to the Georgian Defense Ministry, Batirashvili was arrested in September 2010 for illegally harboring weapons and was sentenced to three years in prison. He was allegedly released after serving about 16 months in early 2012 and immediately left the country. According to an interview on a jihadist website, Batirashvili said that prison transformed him; "I promised God that if I come out of prison alive, I'll go fight jihad for the sake of God", he said.

Batirashvili reportedly told his father that he was leaving for Istanbul, where members of the Chechen diaspora were ready to recruit him to lead fighters inside war-ravaged Syria; an older brother had already gone to Syria some months before. In an interview, Batirashvili said that he had considered going to Yemen and briefly lived in Egypt before ultimately arriving in Syria in March 2012.