North Caucasus Security Outlook

Опубликовано на EGF: 18.12.2009

by Публикация EGF

Ten years on, Putinite stability in the Caucasus remains fragile

Russia during the Putin (and now Putin-Medvedev) years has, to a good degree, been successful in casting an image of increasing national wealth, external power and domestic stability. When Vladimir Putin was appointed by then Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, from relative obscurity to become prime minister in August 1999, it appeared that Russia’s north east Caucasus republics were in danger of being overrun by an increasingly potent insurgency spearheaded by home-grown Islamic militants. During Putin’s second month in office, September 1999, a series of bomb blasts in suburban Moscow apartment blocs killed scores of civilians, inciting a climate of fear and aroused particular concern that the rebellion in the distant and civil war-stricken Caucasus republic of Chechnya was proliferating into the Russian heartland.

Although major acts of terrorism linked to Caucasus militants continued during Putin’s first presidential term (including the Nord Ost theatre hostage massacre, October 2002; the Beslan school massacre in September 2004; as well as attacks on commercial airliners and the Moscow metro), the former-KGB officer and political hard—liner made his mark on Russian politics as having brought stability (and a sprinkling of wealth) to the country. Ten years on, despite recent public relations initiatives such as the announcement by the Kremlin last April that “counter-terrorist operations in Chechnya have formally ended”, the violent challenge posed by Caucasus-based Islamists to the Russian authorities shows no sign of abatement. To the contrary, it has spread to the republics of Dagestan, Ingushetia and Karachaevo-Cherkessia, while Chechnya continues to be the scene of regular clashes between militants and the Kadyrovites, the state militias loyal to 33-year-old Chechen President, Ramzan Kadyrov.

Chechen president participates in special forces operation

Last month, Chechen Minister of Internal Affairs, Ruslan Alkhanov, announced that almost 150 “members of illegal armed formations have been liquidated by the Chechen state security agencies” across the north Caucasus from April till end October (2009), most of them in Chechnya. At the very end of October, Kadyrov was said to have personally taken part in a special-forces operation in Grozny, the Chechen capital, which led to the death of Ali Khasanov, Emir of Flatland Chechnya and close ally of top Chechen militant, Dokka Umarov. Although Russian federal money is pouring into Grozny under the regime of the Kremlin-loyal Kadyrov, a key characteristic distinguishing the present Chechen insurgency from that of one decade ago is that much of the physical fighting is being conducted between the Kadyrovites and the militants, as opposed to the militants and Russian federal forces.

Top government officials targeted in the republic of Ingushetia

In neighbouring Dagestan and Ingushetia, however, the security environment during the course of the year has been significantly more alarming than in Chechnya, where there is little evidence that the regime of the Kremlin-backed Kadyrov is in danger of being usurped by the militants. The situation in Ingushetia, and to a lesser degree, Dagestan, appears to be more volatile at present, as insurgent related incidents have been taking place in these two Russian republics of the north eastern Caucasus almost on a daily basis. Insurgent attacks have become increasingly brazen in Ingushetia, targeting both civilian and government positions. August was a particularly bloody month in the republic and saw the Ingush Construction Minister, Ruslan Amerkhanov, being assassinated by unidentified gunmen as he walked to his office in the morning (August 12), while no less than 20 people were killed when a truck laden with explosives rammed into the gates of the police headquarters in the republican capital, Nazran, in an apparent suicide bombing (August 17). Up to 120 further persons were reported injured in the bombing, in an act reminiscent in style and execution to ongoing expressions of terror in Iraq and North West Pakistan.

Last August’s spate of terrorism in Ingushetia was preceded by an assassination attempt on the Ingush president, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, when his heavily armed motorcade was struck by an insurgent bombing in another suicide attack on June 22. It nearly succeeded, as Yevkurov barely survived the attack, in which at least one of his bodyguards was killed. Last week (December 10), unidentified attackers fired a grenade launcher at a car in which soldiers were traveling on the outskirts of Nazran, in the republic’s Nasyrkorotovsky district. No soldiers or local residents were hurt in the attack. On the previous day, an improvised explosive device was discovered just 10 meters away from the Mozdok-Vladikavkaz natural gas pipeline in Ingushetia’s Nazran district. Bomb disposal experts destroyed the device in a controlled explosion. At the time of writing, on December 17, reports of another large scale suicide bombing in Nazran had just been announced, with a number of deaths confirmed to have taken place.

Dagestan continues to witness daily attacks

Also last week, in neighbouring Dagestan, two alleged members of “illegal armed formations” were reportedly killed (December 9) during a special operation in the village of Shamkhal-Termen. On December 5, a policeman was killed and another wounded in a shootout with militants in Dagestan’s Sergokalinksky district. One day earlier, a bomb blast in a café in the Dagestani city of Khasavyurt wounded four members of an OMON special tasks police unit (one of whom subsequently died of his injuries), while on December 3 an unidentified gunman wearing a mask shot and wounded four policemen in another café, this one on the outskirts of Khasavyurt. One local resident was killed in the shooting. Earlier on the same day, unidentified attackers in a car fired on a police post in Dagestan’s Levashinsk district, killing two policemen. Last week, Dagestan’s acting Interior Minister, Alexander Trofimov, announced that there have been around 200 attempts on the lives of police officers in the republic since the start of the year, which was almost twice that of last year. More than 50 policemen have been killed and around 120 wounded during 2009 thus far.

Dagestan state security forces have killed 135 rebels this year according to republican government sources, compared with 77 in 2008, and 111 people suspected of terrorist activities have been detained this year. The overwhelming majority of attacks on police officials have been taking place in Makhachkala (the Dagestani capital) and Khasavyurt. As many as six terrorist groups totaling up to 150 members are operating in Dagestan, according to the interior ministry (in Makhachkala, Khasavyurt and Kizilyurt, Gubden, Gimry, Balakhani and southern Dagestan), with each group having between 10 to 40 members. Local sources suggest that insurgent attacks have intensified amidst widespread allegations of police brutality and illegal detention of “more and more young people believed to be adherents of Islam of the fundamentalist persuasion”.

Dagestani interior minister placed at top of Islamists death list

Repressive measures by Dagestani state forces have continued despite the insurgents’ assassination of Dagestan’s notorious Interior Minister, Adilgirei Magomedtagirov, on June 9. Magomedtagirov was killed after being shot in the heart by an armour-piercing bullet while he was attending the wedding of a daughter of one of his subordinates in Makhachkala. The assassins, firing automatic sniper rifles, also killed the head of the administrative department of Dagestan’s Interior Ministry, Abdurazak Abakarov, and wounded eight police officers standing close to the minister. Magomedtagirov has been a prime target for Caucasus Islamists since at least 2005, when his name was put at the top of a death list published on a local Muslim extremists’ web site, for frequent employment of torture as a method of obtaining confessions from captured Islamists. Magomedtagirov had already narrowly escaped attacks on his motorcade in 2006 and 2007, in which several police around him were killed. He came in for criticism for his methods from Dagestan’s president, Mukhu Aliyev, particularly after he began ordering the demolition of residential structures where rebels were believed to have been hiding.

Caucasus terror ramming home at the national level

As Vladimir Putin commences a second decade at the helm of political management in Russia, an ominous pattern in the country’s domestic security is not only starting to reproduce itself, but could yet pose a challenge too great for the Kremlin to overcome. While the insurgency in Ingushetia and Dagestan, and to a lesser degree Chechnya, is spiralling dangerously out of control, like India’s Kashmiri conflict or Ankara’s violent struggle against PKK Kurdish separatists, Russia’s insurgency remains largely contained within the geographical boundaries of a historically defined territory. In a similar vain to the two aforementioned examples of separatist conflicts, and indeed, to many similar insurgencies currently ongoing around the world, the Kremlin’s challenge will be to ensure that Caucasus-based Islamic militants remain limited in the degree to which they can facilitate the expression of terror on a country-wide basis. The Kremlin’s nightmare scenario is one where the Caucasus insurgency escalates in a manner where it jeopardises national-level security and where Russian citizens can become subject to the deadly consequences of terror no matter where they may reside in the country. We have already seen this to be the case when Putin was appointed prime minister in 1999 and throughout much of the period of his first presidential term in 2000—2004.

Although there has been a notable absence of Caucasus related national-level acts of terror in Russia since 2004, the train bombing on the St.Petersburg-Moscow “Nevsky Express”, on November 27, has come as a stark reminder of the ominous threat that Caucasus militants continue to pose for Russian national security. At least 26 people are now known to have been killed in the bombing and a further 100 injured, many of them seriously. Caucasus-based Islamic militants claimed responsibility for the blast, posting the announcement on an Islamist website where they extolled the virtues of an operation in which they “liquidated many Russian government officials” (as government and business executives frequently use the high speed “Nevsky Express” to shuttle between Russia’s two main cities). Two heads of Russian government federal agencies were amongst the casualties.

Violence is Russia’s destiny

While not all website responsibility claims for acts of terror in Russia posted on Islamist websites can actually be attributed to Islamic radicals, many senior Russian officials appear to believe that the “Nevsky Express” train bombing was part of the Caucasus Islamic rebels’ efforts to widen their insurgency to the national level. Many expect more attacks to follow. Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, in a national address on November 12, had already described the imbroglio in the Caucasus as Russia’s “greatest internal political issue”, whilst Putin responded to many questions on Caucasus security from the Russian public during his annual, nationally televised prime minister’s (Putin’s) question time earlier this month. There is much talk within Russian government circles at present about the appointment of a senior state official, including Deputy Prime Minister, Sergei Ivanov, to a new, high ranking post as the Kremlin’s special representative for the north Caucasus republics. The overarching concern of the appointee would be to address the security situation in the Caucasus. Ramzan Kadyrov, who was recently appointed to the rank of major-general of the Russian police, has also been mentioned as a possible candidate for the post.

Clearly, significant power and resources would be made available to the Kremlin appointee to the Caucasus, although this would provide little guarantee of an end to the insurgency and demilitarisation of the region. Smaller scale, Kremlin-backed “strong man” experiments have already been tried. Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, who only recently left hospital after near fatal wounds, is a much decorated Ingush colonel in the Russian army whose candidature as Ingush president was endorsed by Medvedev, envisaging his ability to clean up the republic both at the insurgency and corruption levels. Violence, it seems, is Russia’s destiny, however, particularly when it comes to taming the country’s “wild south”, a region just as much a part of Russia as it is separate from it.

While the bombing on the “Nevsky Express” gripped national attention at the end of last month, a very similar, attempted terrorist act was taking place in Dagestan, where an explosion at the Izberbash-Inchh wayside station on the Makhachkala branch of the North Caucasus railroad caused the derailment of passenger train 374 from Tyumen to Baku. There have already been seven explosions on trains in Dagestan since July of this year, according to the Republic’s Interior Minister, Ashahan Magomedov, all of which followed a similar pattern and resulted from liquid explosives. It seems of little surprise, therefore, that Russian security officials believe that the “Nevsky Express” bombing is a sign of things to come.

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