You know those days when you wake up and plan to write about Tajiks in IS, but then a totally unknown group of Tatars from Kazan appear and make a video address? Yeah, I know. So the Al-Bushra Sham media group, which is run by Tatars (apparently from Kazan in Tatarstan, Russia) has published a video address announcing the uniting of two groups from the Urals and Tatarstan into one larger group, Katiba al-Mahdi.

Sources in Syria say this is the first time they have heard of the groups involved (!), which are Джамаат Булгар и катиба Джунуд Шам иль-Исламия.

Al Bushra Sham has been around for a while on social media, since November 2015 at least, when it was associated with a group named Junud al-Shomal al-Islami, which no one has really heard of.

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A masked militant in the video announces the merger as being good news from the Blessed Land of Sham for Ramadan and says, among other things, that they are fighting the Shaytan including Putin who is “busy killing Muslims” which he had begun in Chechnya and Dagestan and was now continuing in Syria.

We are currently exploring whether the group is independent or whether it is associated with others.