"Find and annihilate!"

As you may have heard, a Russian luxury train traveling from Moscow to St. Petersburg was bombed and derailed last week, killing more than two dozen people. Turns out Islamist separatists from the Caucasus are saying they did it:

Chechen rebels claimed responsibility Wednesday for last week's Russian train bombing, which killed at least 26 people and injured scores of others, a Web site sympathetic to the militants said.

The claim, posted on the Kavkazcenter.com site, could buttress the suspicions of officials who are tracing the attack to Islamist separatists in Russia's North Caucasus region. It also raises fears of a fresh wave of attacks outside the region after a five-year break - a renewal of violence that would mirror the growing unrest inside the region.

The separatist statement, issued on behalf of Chechen separatist leader Doku Umarov, claimed Friday's bombing of a Moscow-St. Petersburg express train was carried out on his orders.

"We declare that this operation was prepared and carried out ... pursuant to the order of the Emir of Caucasus Emirate," or Umarov, the statement said.

As you might expect, Russians are pissed.

The attack has struck a nerve in Russian society. About 1,500 people gathered for a state-sanctioned anti-terrorism rally in St. Petersburg on Wednesday.

Participants in the protest, organized by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's party United Russia, held banners, with slogans including "Terrorists are not People and "Find and Annihilate."

Of course, the cops were walking around on the day of the bombing asking local residents if they'd seen anyone that looked Chechen, so I'm not sure it made much difference who claimed responsibility.

Meanwhile, the Russia's most prominent spiritual leader is telling Christians to steel themselves for a long struggle:

The powerful head of Russia’s Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, issued a statement Sunday warning that Friday’s train attack could trigger increased tensions between Russia’s majority Christian and large Muslim communities. And in a politically inspirational vein, which has so far been absent from the comments of Kremlin leaders about the tragedy, Kirill urged Russians to dig in for a long war against terrorism.

“This is a grave challenge for our people,” he said. “A crime, in which any one of us could be the victim, has been committed for effect. Everyone living in Russia is being intimidated.”

There's been plenty of recent local violence, which isn't much of a surprise to anyone anymore, but now Russian security types are speculating that the Chechen cause has gone out of area again. You're also likely to see a lot of speculation about smaller attacks, "leaderless jihad," and the same sort of discussions that are coming out of the Fort Hood shootings, all leading to the conclusion that the Russians are really bad at internal policing (sort of ironic, ain't it?). Case in point:

Andrei Soldatov, editor of Agentura.ru, an Internet journal that reports on security issues (an English-language version is here) says that Russia’s security forces, at great cost, did manage to crush the large-scale terrorist operations mounted by Chechen terrorist Shamil Basayev, such as the 2002 siege of a Moscow theater, and the 2004 Beslan school assault, in which scores of terrorist commandos sometimes moved hundreds of miles to hit their targets.

But, he says, like generals preparing for the last war, Russian security services remain fixated on preventing big, spectacular attacks like those of the recent past, instead of preparing for smaller-scale strikes at targets of opportunity, such as the bombings of the Nevsky Express.

“We see new modus operandi taking shape, in which tiny cells of terrorists of 3 to 5 people plan and execute acts of sabotage,” he says. “But our security forces have militarized this problem, and are not set up to deal with small threats like that. The main agency dealing with anti-terrorism is the Interior Ministry, which basically operates an internal army. They are in no way ready for what may be coming,” he says.

Won't be the last of this, I'm sure.

More violence in the North Caucasus

Today it's Chechnya. From the New York Times:

GROZNY, Russia (AP) -- Suicide bombers on bicycles detonated explosives in Chechnya on Friday, killing at least four police officers and a civilian in coordinated attacks in the capital, officials said.

The suicide bombers approached police officers in two central locations in Grozny and blew themselves up, killing two officers in each attack, said Chechnya's Interior Minister Ruslan Alkhanov in televised remarks.

Russian emergency services spokesman Alexei Zemskov said three other people were wounded. An Associated Press reporter saw body parts scattered at the sites of both attacks, which come at the beginning of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

This just a day after President Medvedev spoke about the deteriorating security situation in the Russian Caucasus and outlined a program to address it.

President Dmitry Medvedev said Russia must pursue “real, not cosmetic” stability in the North Caucasus, an indication of just how much the security situation has deteriorated and how disappointed the Kremlin now is in the claims by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin that the situation there has been improving. But Medvedev’s five-point program, which he presented to the leaders of Russia’s security services
Wednesday, does not appear to promise any greater success, let alone justify his Putinesque statement that “one must not stand on ceremony with the terrorists. They must be liquidated without hesitation.”

What Medvedev’s proposals do appear to presage, however, is a further expansion of Russian military actions there, a greater willingness to dismiss local officials possibly with the installation of ethnic Russians in their place and as a result, at least in the short- and medium term, an increase in the already high level of violence in the North Caucasus.

Medvedev’s program includes: a call for better interagency coordination among the siloviki; a “radical reconstruction of work with cadres;” better protection for law enforcement personnel; changes in the law to ensure that terrorists are punished; and a meeting on the North Caucasus about how to improve economic conditions there.

All of which kind of makes me wonder what the hell Russia even wants with Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, and so on. I mean, I guess it gives them contiguous territory for the annexation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, or something.

So who's ready to book tickets for the 2014 Olympics in Sochi?

Suicide truck bomb in Ingushetia kills 20

Today in the Russian region of Ingushetia -- contiguous to Chechnya and proximate to other troubled north Caucasian territories -- a truck bomb exploded outside a police station, killing 20 people.

Russia’s interior ministry said the truck, driven by a suicide bomber, smashed into the gate of the police station in Nazran, the Ingush capital, before exploding as officers assembled for morning parade.

The blast, which injured 118 – including women and children – led to Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, sacking the Ingush minister of the interior, saying the atrocity could have been prevented.

“I suggest [the attack] was not just the result of problems connected with terrorist activity, but also the result of the unsatisfactory character of law enforcers’ work in the republic,” he said.

It was the deadliest in a string of recent high-profile attacks that are destabilising the mainly Muslim regions on Russia’s southern flank.

In June, the interior minister in Dagestan was gunned down in a Mafia-style killing at a wedding and weeks later there was an assassination attempt on Yunus-bek Yevkurov, the president of Ingushetia.

The Kremlin has blamed the escalating violence on Islamist extremists.

Not Yevkurov, though, who made noises about Western involvement, suggesting that Russia's purported return to great power status might be too much for the rest of us to handle.

“I have stressed this [before] and am saying again now: the west will strive not to allow Russia to revive its former Soviet might,” he told Russian radio.

Mr Yevkurov, a former paratrooper, was appointed by the Kremlin last October to bring order to Ingushetia, an impoverished region bordering Chechnya.

Of course, everyone's favorite insurgent/terrorist-turned-brutal-sub-governor-turned-patriotic-defender-of-Russian-security, Ramzan Kadyrov, isn't really worried about who did it. He just knows he's going to F that guy up bad when he finds him.

Just hours after the attack on Ingush President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, Kadyrov told Reuters he had been ordered by the Kremlin to fight insurgents in Ingushetia. His comments provoked speculation that Kadyrov was seeking to widen his clout over neighbouring regions in the North Caucasus. Ingush politicians warned such a move could tip the region further into chaos.

"We will conduct our investigation in line with the law of the mountains and our revenge for Yunus-Bek Yevkurov will be ruthless," Kadyrov was quoted as saying in the local capital, Magas, where he met acting Ingush president Rashid Gaisanov.

The statement indicated Kadyrov was referring to the region's ancient tradition of
blood feuds. Ingush officials said Kadyrov's visit had been a surprise.

Kadyrov, of course, has been implicated in just about every sort of brutality you can imagine in the North Caucasus. Just yesterday, the L.A. Times ran a feature piece on Kadyrov's involvement in the campaign of terror sweeping across Ingushetia -- and this was before the bombing.

Day after day, insurgents attack police and government officials with ambushes and bombings. And day after day, security forces unleash what human rights activists describe as a campaign of killings, abductions and torture in their efforts to force calm upon the land.

Now Ingushetia is struggling under the weight of a new terror, one that seeps over the mountains from Chechnya, a neighboring mostly Muslim Russian republic.

Having brutally squashed dissent in his own restive republic, Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, a young Kremlin-backed former rebel known for his ruthless style of rule, is sending his notorious squads of fighters to hunt down rebels in Ingushetia.

With Kadyrov's authority creeping over the boundary, Ingushetia has become a land without accountability. Killings may be attributed to the Russian government, local authorities, separatist rebels or Chechens. Lives disappear in the tangle of overlain bureaucracy and shrugged shoulders.

This article does a pretty good job of giving Kadyrov's backstory if you're unfamiliar with it.

Interestingly, the Chechens seem to have become the Kremlin's sort of shock troops in recent years (since Kadyrov's turning). Pictures emerged last year, in the early days of the Georgian war, showing BMPs in the Russian invasion force with "Yamadayevtsi" graffiti, manned by irregulars. Here's some analysis from that time:

a number of the Russian tanks and armored vehicles have “Chechnya Vostok" and “Yamadayevtsi” painted on the hulls.

The Eastern Battalion (Chechnya) is composed of loyalist (pro-Moscow) Chechens; they are led by a man named Sulim Yamadayev, who is — along with Ramzan Kadyrov, a name you might know — among the most influential loyalist Chechen warlords. He fought against the Russians in the first Chechen War (pre-1996), and eventually turned with Kadyrov. If you listen to him, it’s because he opposed the Islamic extremists who gained control of the Chechen separatist movement. Others say Putin bought him off.

In any event, what this means is that the Russians have committed battle-hardened veterans to Georgia, not their poorly-paid, poorly-trained, and poorly-equipped regulars. Also interesting to see this war against a Caucasian people being prosecuted by other Caucasians who have felt the brunt of Russian oppression.

Also of note: the British media has reported that the Yamadayevtsi (what those of the Eastern Battalion call themselves) routinely sexually abuse and torture captured civilians to death, also often severing the heads of enemy dead.

(Ralph Peters later did a story on this same subject. Of course, he used it as evidence that we should be going to war with those dirty, inscrutable Russkies. Or something.)

In any event, I guess I don't have much of a point with all these peripherals except to say that considering Russia's history with quelling Islamist, ethnic, and separatist insurgency, and Kadyrov's history of involvement in this sort of dirty business, I wouldn't rule anything out at this stage. If we later find that Kadyrov's people are responsible for the "insurgent" violence, giving the government an opportunity and rationale for cracking down, I won't be the least bit surprised. Nor would I be if he was acting without Moscow's approval.

Worth keeping an eye on it.

Chivers on Estimirova

C.J. Chivers, who wrote the best thing you'll ever read on Beslan (and has done excellent reporting from the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan, among other places) has a profile in today's New York Times on Natalya Estimirova.

As the blog's purported "Russia guy," I should've brought this story up before now: Estimirova was an activist who worked to expose the atrocities committed by both Russian authorities and anti-government rebels in Chechnya, and she was found murdered on Thursday. She and Chivers were friends.

Read and feel bleak about both Russia and the Caucasus.