In Syria, Russia may fight an Islamic State commander it’s battled before

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• GWEN IFILL:

  New reports surfaced today that the U.S. and Russia will begin military-to-military talks about Syria, even as Vladimir Putin moves to bolster his old ally Bashar al-Assad. But will Russia also be fighting a man they have battled before?

  Chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner reports.

• MARGARET WARNER:

  The man is Abu Omar al Shishani, the Islamic State military commander for the Northern District of Syria, seen here last August as the group pursued its lightning march across Northern and Central Iraq.

• ABU OMAR AL SHISHANI, Islamic State (through interpreter):

  It is time for the sons of the Islamic State to defend the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham and defend our imam, who the world gathered against with all its strength.

• MARGARET WARNER:

  Unlike most I.S. fighters, he was speaking Russian. His real name is Tarkhan Batirashvili. He's an ethnic Chechen reportedly born 30 years ago in Georgia, then part of the Soviet Union, to a Christian father and Muslim mother. Tapped as a special forces soldier in the Georgian army, he fought fiercely against the Russian army when the two countries went to war over the province of South Ossetia in 2008.

  Mitchell Prothero of McClatchy Newspapers has just written an exhaustive profile of al Shishani, with startling new information. I spoke with him via Skype from his bureau in Northern Iraq.

  How significant a military figure is al Shishani in ISIS?

• MITCHELL PROTHERO, McClatchy Newspapers:

  If he's not the overall military commander for the Islamic State, he's definitely in charge of the Northern Syrian Front, which is one of the most active and serious.

• MARGARET WARNER:

  Now, you uncovered a very interesting new twist in this story, with — some of his skills actually came from training by the Americans.

• MITCHELL PROTHERO:

  In 2005 and '6, there was a lot of cooperation — and there still is today on some level — between the American intelligence services and the U.S. military in training the Georgian armies and their intelligence services.

  He had been tapped for training as a special forces unit. And that was done through the United States. But, again, there was nothing that would flag him as a security risk on paper.

• MARGARET WARNER:

  How effective was he as a fighter against the Russians back in 2008?

• MITCHELL PROTHERO:

  He was considered a rising star of the Georgian military.

  He was a senior non-commissioned officer in a special forces unit that was tasked with basically being the eyes and ears of the Georgian military and was one of their most successful battle commanders during the very brief 2008 war before the Russians sort of rolled over them.

• MARGARET WARNER:

  Yet, scarcely six years later, he was in Syria, swearing allegiance to the Islamic State. It's an unusual evolution for a man brought up in a moderate Muslim enclave in the predominantly Christian nation of Georgia.

  Shishani was arrested in 2010 on what his family says was a trumped-up weapons possession charge and he spent 16 months in prison. Once released, he fled to Istanbul.

• MITCHELL PROTHERO:

  At that point, he appears to have been radicalized somewhat, maybe his prison experience. And people also suggested that the death of his mother to cancer shortly after his release from prison sort of led to him having a religious awakening, and he adopted her religion. His father, as we said, is Christian.

  And by June of 2012, he shows up in Aleppo as a little-known sort of foreign fighter in a small group of guys, and slowly — or, actually, rather quickly, built a movement that slowly then became part of the Islamic State.

  I was told that part of why he was able to be convinced to bring his unit and to join the Islamic State was a promise that the Islamic State would organize basically an emirate in the Caucasus that would then go after the Russians.

• MARGARET WARNER:

  And, says Prothero, al Shishani has emerged as an effective recruiter of other Muslim fighters from other former Soviet republics.

• MITCHELL PROTHERO:

  The Chechens and a lot of these other former Russian-speaking province guys have a tendency to be very professional, military-wise.

  They're considered sort of the shock troops or special forces of the Islamic State. They're moved around from place to place to fight in specific areas. They were part of the Mosul operation, although a lot of that was local Iraqis. There is always sort of a core of these just very disciplined and experienced foreign fighters, as opposed to the guys that are coming from Europe.

• MARGARET WARNER:

  What makes him so particularly effective? What makes him a standout in that group of already effective and disciplined fighters?

• MITCHELL PROTHERO:

  It sounds like he's quite capable of thinking strategically and tactically from a military standpoint that you don't always get with a lot of these guys, even if they're fierce fighters. It takes more to run an army.

• MARGARET WARNER:

  Today, al Shishani is on the U.S. Treasury Department's list of specially designated global terrorists and he carries a $5 million bounty on his head.

  So, as the Russian military appears to be moving its way into Syria, this hardened Chechen fighter may have the battle coming that he's long been waiting for.

  For the PBS NewsHour, I'm Margaret Warner in Washington.