Aug. 27 (Bloomberg) -- A government minister in Russia's southern republic of Dagestan was killed by a bomb as he was driving to work in the capital, Makhachkala, Agence France-Presse reported, citing the Interfax news agency.
Magomedsalikh Gusayev, the information and national policy minister, was killed when an explosive device placed in the road detonated, Interfax said, citing local government officials. His driver survived the blast, they said.
FYI.
How Jihad Made Its Way to Chechnya
Secular Separatist Movement Transformed by Militant Vanguard
By Sharon LaFraniere
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, April 26, 2003;
KARAMAKHI, Dagestan -- This isolated southwest Russian village of dirt roads and one-story clay brick houses was profoundly peaceful, its residents say, until a Jordanian cleric named Khabib Abdurrakhman arrived in the early 1990s with a seemingly irresistible deal.
To a hamlet made destitute by the collapse of the Soviet Union, Abdurrakhman brought a slaughtered cow and a free feast every week. In a place where many people were left jobless by the demise of the local collective farm, he handed out $30 to every convert who came to his simple mosque. And to those adrift in the social chaos of the Soviet breakdown, he offered a new purpose in life -- a form of their traditional Islam rooted in fundamentalism and militancy.
Few questioned where his money came from, or who were the other Arabs who began to drift into the community. By the time questions did arise, it was too late.
By 1999, Abdurrakhman's growing band of followers had transformed the little settlement into an armed enclave, crisscrossed by tunnels and trenches and stockpiled with weapons for Abdurrakhman's true mission: severing Dagestan from Russian control and merging it into an Islamic state with neighboring Chechnya.
"They tried to lure people in a friendly way at first," according to Magomed Makhdiyev, the village imam, who says he tried to withstand the fundamentalists' influence. "But by 1999, they were saying, 'Join us or we'll cut your head off.' "
Those scruples faded in the mid-1990s, as more and more Arab missionaries and fighters flocked to the republic, proclaiming Islamic law, or sharia, and promoting Wahhabist traditions. Warlords had come to dominate Chechen society, and some of them embraced the fundamentalist cause.
The article goes into detail on the funding…
The Arabs' goal went beyond preserving Chechnya's freedom: They wanted to merge Chechnya and Dagestan to create an Islamic state. Chechnya and Dagestan were poorer than the rest of Russia, and Dagestan, though home to a mosaic of ethnic groups, was predominantly Muslim. Its access to the Caspian Sea and its oil and gas reserves gave it a strategic importance to Russia that Chechnya did not share.
One of the new leaders was Khattab, who fought with bin Laden in Afghanistan as a teenager and who had publicly praised the al Qaeda leader as the "main commander of the mujaheddin worldwide." Khattab's position in the rebel movement was assured when he won over Shamil Basayev, Chechnya's best-known militant.
http://www.gabriellereillyweekly.com/full/st072803.htm