Chechen people in the context of "Nart saga"

Chechens in Turkey (Chechen: Туркойчура нохчий, romanized: Turkoyçura noxçiy; Turkish: Türkiye Çeçenleri) are Turkish citizens of Chechen descent and Chechen refugees living in Turkey. The Chechen diaspora in Turkey dates back to the 19th century when the Russian Empire started ethnically cleansing Chechens from their homeland; these expulsions would later become known as the Chechen genocide, contemporaneous with the Circassian genocide.

Chechen (Нохчийн, Noxçiyn, [ˈnɔxt͡ʃĩː]) is a Northeast Caucasian language, spoken primarily by the Chechen people, native to the Russian republic of Chechnya, as well as its neighbouring republics. With approximately 1.8 million speakers, it is also spoken by members of the Chechen diaspora throughout Russia and the rest of the world.

An ethnic conflict is a conflict between two or more ethnic groups. While the source of the conflict may be political, social, economic or religious, the individuals in conflict must expressly fight for their ethnic group's position within society. This criterion differentiates ethnic conflict from other forms of struggle.

Academic explanations of ethnic conflict generally fall into one of three schools of thought: primordialist, instrumentalist or constructivist. Recently, some have argued for either top-down or bottom-up explanations for ethnic conflict. Intellectual debate has also focused on whether ethnic conflict has become more prevalent since the end of the Cold War, and on devising ways of managing conflicts, through instruments such as consociationalism and federalisation.

The Nakh peoples are a group of North Caucasian peoples identified by their use of the Nakh languages and other cultural similarities. These are chiefly the ethnic Chechen, Ingush and Bats peoples of the North Caucasus, including closely related minor or historical groups.

Said-Magomed Shamaevich Kakiyev (Russian: Саид-Магомед Шамаевич Какиев, also spelled Kakiev; born 22 February 1970) is a colonel in the Russian Army, who was the leader of the GRU Spetsnaz Special Battalion Zapad ("West"), a Chechen military force, from 2003 to 2007. Inside Chechnya his men were sometimes referred to as the Kakievtsy. Unlike the other Chechen pro-Moscow forces in Chechnya, Kakiyev and his men are not former rebels and during the First Chechen War were some of the few Chechen militants who fought on the Russian side.

Kakiyev has been declared a Hero of the Russian Federation, has twice received the Order of Courage and was awarded two specially engraved guns by the Russian Minister of Defense. He had been engaged in power struggles for overall military authority with the president of Chechnya Ramzan Kadyrov and the commander of the Special Battalion Vostok ("East") Sulim Yamadayev. In 2007, having left the post of battalion commander, he was appointed deputy military commissar of Chechnya for military-patriotic education of youth.