Suicide bombings, kidnappings, poverty _ Russia’s North Caucasus slips again toward war

After Chechnya, many fear new Caucasus war looming

NAZRAN, Russia — Melted rubber sandals float in the bus-sized crater outside what’s left of the Nazran city police department.

The devastation is testament to what happened just after 9 a.m. on Aug. 17 when a man crashed a bomb-laden van through the station gates and into a crowd of police officers gathered for roll call.

The attack in the main city of the long-troubled region of Ingushetia killed at least 24 people and injured more than 200. Moreover, it provided glaring evidence that this impoverished Russian republic has replaced Chechnya as the latest battleground in the mostly Muslim North Caucasus, where this past summer has been the deadliest in years.

“Practically speaking, this is already civil war, and the Kremlin is to blame,” said Magomed Mutsolgov, who heads MAShR, a prominent rights group in Ingushetia.

Ten years after sending troops into neighboring Chechnya to crush a separatist insurgency for the second time, the Kremlin now faces a potentially far more serious problem: blowback that is roiling this Rhode Island-sized republic and rippling throughout the North Caucasus, the patchwork of autonomous territories on Russia’s underbelly.

Suicide bombings, once rare, are happening more often, sometimes on successive days. The republic’s Kremlin-appointed president — himself the target of a suicide bombing — has warned that Islamic extremism is permeating the region, and that Moscow’s missteps have opened the door to foreign militants.

At least 135 civilians, police and other officials were killed in Ingushetia between May 1 and Aug. 28, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. MAShR counts at least 250 dead in 2009, up from 96 three years ago.

Some are already making comparisons to Somalia and Afghanistan.

“This type of insurgency is already very familiar to the United States,” said Tanya Lokshina, a researcher with Human Rights Watch.

Even without a full-blown insurgency, Ingushetia is a hard case. Three-quarters of the work force is unemployed, there are no big factories, and refugees from Chechnya and other war-hit Caucasus regions since the 1990s are so numerous that at one point they were estimated to have doubled Ingushetia’s population of 300,000.

Subsistence farming is the norm. Nowadays, car traffic backs up behind wandering cow herds as often as it does behind heavily armed troops combing the region’s dusty, pitted roads for explosives.

In 2002, the Kremlin replaced Ingushetia’s popular president with Murat Zyazikov, who took a hard-line approach to rising violence. A high-ranking former KGB officer, Zyazikov sent police and security squads into homes to root out insurgent sympathizers and political opponents.

Since then, at least 175 people have been abducted, according to MAShR; Mutsolgov believes most are dead, and he believes fear of the authorities — and outrage over the epidemic of abductions — is driving new recruits to the insurgents.

“Most of the people who’ve taken up arms now are the ones who have had their relatives killed, their brothers gone missing,” he said.

On Aug. 4, Magomed-Bashir Cherbizhev, 19, left the two-room Nazran apartment he shares with his parents and two siblings, headed for a bazaar to buy shoes. He hasn’t been heard from since.

Whether he was abducted by police or joined an insurgent group is not known. His mother, Aishat, doesn’t believe the latter theory suggested by police. She said he hated camping and could barely slaughter a chicken.

“He’s in a forest, he’s in a grave, he’s alive, he’s dead — we just want some information about him, any information. No mother should ever have to go through this,” she said. “May Allah return him.”

Last October, after months of protests and the police killing of the editor of a popular Ingush Web site, the Kremlin sacked Zyazikov and replaced him with Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, a former military intelligence officer.

Yevkurov moved to rein in the more heavy-handed police tactics and to reach out to opposition groups. But many now fear it’s too late. A top regional judge and a former deputy prime minister were killed by gunmen within a week of each other, and on June 22, a suicide bomber swerved his car into Yevkurov’s convoy, badly wounding him and killing three bodyguards.

Then came the Nazran police bombing. It was one of the worst the North Caucasus has witnessed, and was flaunted on Web sites sympathetic to insurgent groups. Set to a Muslim religious chant, the video showed the yellow minivan ramming through the metal gates, then exploding into an orange fireball and making parked cars seem to jump off the pavement.

Chechnya, under the brutal leadership of Ramzan Kadyrov and before him, his assassinated father Akhmad, has quieted to a low-grade conflict of hit-and-run ambushes and roadside bombings. The center of Grozny, once battered into a moonscape, has been refurbished with bright lights, lawns, newly painted building facades and park benches.

But while the transformation of Chechnya’s capital is showcased by the Kremlin as evidence of success, Ingushetia has slipped into mayhem. Many blame the relentless press of Kadyrov’s forces in Chechnya pushing militants into Ingushetia.

Counting the entire North Caucasus, including Chechnya, the CSIS tallied 442 killed in the four months ending Aug. 28.

The Kremlin now appears to be acknowledging that things are getting worse in Ingushetia.

At a meeting last month of regional leaders, President Dmitry Medvedev blamed the violence on surging Islamic extremism and young people being drawn to extremist Web sites or teachings at universities in Muslim countries.

But Yevkurov and other leaders focused on Moscow’s shortcomings.

“We failed to take timely action to get the situation under our control,” Yevkurov said, according to a Kremlin transcript. Meanwhile “foreign emissaries grabbed the initiative” and Islamic extremism has “permeated all facets of society.” He did not say where the alleged foreign intruders came from.

For now, the turmoil appears to be mostly a domestic problem for Russia, but the region’s woes have a history of spilling internationally. Foreign fighters from the Middle East and Central Asia aided Chechen rebels against Russian forces in the 1990s; some even reportedly trained at camps in Chechnya during the three years that the region had de-facto independence. Some are believed to have gone on to fight in Afghanistan or Iraq, or more recently, in Pakistan.

“The North Caucasus is a hot zone — Russia’s most pressing domestic problem and a burgeoning international concern,” Sarah Mendelson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies wrote in a recent report. “Pockets of lawlessness have a way of traversing the Earth in the 21st century and causing tragedy.”

Osama bin-Laden has expressed solidarity with rebels in the past, and Russian officials have also long alleged ties between al-Qaida and Caucasus insurgents.

Many analysts say any ties to al-Qaida are currently loose at best. More important, critics say, is that the Kremlin has failed to find a way to juggle the stubborn grudges and shifting loyalties within the North Caucasus, where revenge is an important part of local justice.

“The Caucasus operates under its own laws,” said Alexei Malashenko, an analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center. “Moscow hasn’t understood this.”