In the past two years, the simmering insurgency in Russia’s north Caucasus has exploded into open revolt. Daily attacks against government security forces and bomb explosions have become a part of everyday life.
Across Ingushetia, Chechnya, Dagestan and Karabino-Balkaria, Islamist fighters are waging a violent struggle to overthrow their local and federal rulers. Increasingly, they are winning. Friday’s apparent bombing of an express train between Moscow and St Petersburg raises the spectre that this conflict in Russia’s troublesome Muslim south is again spilling over into Russia’s vulnerable European heart. A second deadly attack similar to Friday’s explosion would confirm that after a deceptive five-year pause, Chechen terrorism is defiantly back.
On Saturday night Alexei Malashenko, Russia’s leading expert on the restive north Caucasus, cautioned it was too early to tell if Chechens were behind Friday’s blast, but conceded: ”There could be links between the explosion and radical Islamic activists.”
He said that the insurgency in Russia’s volatile south was now spiralling out of control. ”The situation is very bad. It seems to me that the east part of the North Caucasus is in a state of civil war. Every day somebody is killed. There is a lack of stability.”
According to Malashenko, the Islamist fighters have a long-term goal of creating an Islamic caliphate in the region. In the short term, however, they are simply seeking to provoke a popular uprising against the widely detested federal government and its corrupt local representatives.
The Kremlin fought two brutal wars in Chechnya between 1994 and 1996, and 1999 and 2005. In recent years, the Russian government has boasted it has pacified the territories. The attacks once waged by suicidal Chechen commanders have ceased. There has been no repeat of Beslan, the school in North Ossetia infamously seized by Chechens in September 2004, in which more than 330 people, mostly children, died.
However, the rebels appear to have regrouped, their numbers swelled by zealous teenage recruits. This year has seen a series of attacks, including an assassination attempt on Ingushetia’s Kremlin-appointed president, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, and the devastating bombing of a police station.
Most ominously, in the spring, veteran Chechen guerrilla leader Doku Umarov said he was reviving the notorious Riyadus Salikhin group, a suicide battalion of ”Chechen martyrs”. The Kremlin regularly says Umarov has been killed. The evidence suggests he is still alive. – guardian.co.uk