Posted on 09/05/2004 10:15:50 PM PDT by wagglebee
BESLAN, Russia, Sept. 5 - Inside the charred, bullet-pocked wreckage of Middle School No. 1, there lies evidence of the terror Russia faces: Two parts of the library's wooden floor had been pried up, evidently by the heavily armed attackers who seized the school last week and held more than 1,100 hostages for 52 hours.
Beneath the boards, investigators now suspect, the attackers had secreted a cache of weapons or other equipment weeks and perhaps months before their attack - possibly during a seemingly innocuous summer renovation, officials said.
Investigators have only begun to piece together the planning that went into this worst terrorist attack in the new Russia, which by an official count on Sunday left 338 hostages dead. But the holes in the library's floor, which might easily be overlooked in the gruesome carnage of the school, underscored the sophistication and coordination that have increasingly characterized the attacks that have convulsed the country.
The attackers - described by the authorities as including Chechens, Ingush, ethnic Russians and some still-unidentified foreigners - seemed to follow a plan after they seized the school with precision and alacrity, forcing their hostages to help place explosives and build barricades that limited the options of Russian forces outside.
The attackers wore NATO-issued camouflage. They carried gas masks, compasses and first-aid kits. They communicated with hand-held radios, and brought along two sentry dogs, as expertly trained as the attackers themselves, the officials said. All suggested detailed planning, including surveillance and possibly rehearsals, the officials said.
"They knew the geography of the school grounds like their own backyard," the chief spokesman for Russia's Federal Security Service, Sergei N. Ignatchenko, said in a telephone interview on Saturday. "This allowed them to choose sniper positions and place booby-traps on all possible access routes."
The planning behind the siege mirrored that of a series of attacks that have roiled Russia, beginning with a similar siege of a Moscow theater during a performance of a musical called "Nord-Ost" in October 2002 and continuing through a grim litany of suicide bombings and other strikes that culminated in the brutality here last week.
Like militants of Al Qaeda, which President Vladimir V. Putin and others contend provides succor to Chechnya's separatists, the militants believed to be behind all the attacks have managed to deploy cells of ideologues who spend extended periods organizing and carrying out spectacular, unnerving attacks, often suicidal ones. Their tactics, complex and flexible and carried out by guerrillas who control no real territory where they could operate freely, have left the police and security forces guessing where the next attack will be.
The attackers - believed to be members of a contingent led by Shamil Basayev, Chechnya's most notorious and lethal rebel commander - have moved seamlessly between the North Caucasus and Moscow, while evading Russia's extensive, if at times ineffective, security apparatus. They have done so despite particular scrutiny that falls on anyone appearing to be Chechen, let alone large, heavily bearded and heavily armed men like those who seized Middle School No. 1.
In February, a female suicide bomber, possibly with an accomplice, destroyed a Moscow subway car, killing at least 41 early-morning commuters. In May, a bomb planted beneath a stadium grandstand killed Chechnya's president, Akhmad Kadyrov, as he watched a Victory Day parade in the republic's capital, Grozny. In June, hundreds of insurgents used stolen uniforms of the local police to seize much of the capital of the adjacent Ingushetia region for hours, stopping and killing the real police officers who raced to reinforce their colleagues. Nearly 100 died before the fighters withdrew and disappeared.
On Aug. 21, fighters carried out a similar raid in Grozny that killed at least 22 people. Three days later, bombs believed to be carried by two Chechen women destroyed separate passenger airliners almost simultaneously, killing 90 people. A week later, another bomber, also a woman, blew herself up outside the Rizhskaya subway station in Moscow, killing 10 people. Hours after that, the siege in Beslan began.
Since the "Nord-Ost" siege, the attacks have killed 1,000 Russians, most of them civilians with little connection to the Chechen conflict.
"They have shown they are able to do everything they want in each corner of Russia," Aleksei Malashenko, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said of those behind the attacks.
Mr. Putin, evidently frustrated by the failure to prevent them, used a national address Saturday night to criticize the corruption gnawing at law enforcement and the judiciary, and to call for a more unified and coordinated effort to fight terrorism in Russia.
"We must create a more effective security system, to demand from our law enforcement bodies actions adequate in level and scale to the new threats," he said.
While Mr. Putin attributed the siege and other attacks to "the direct intervention of international terror against Russia," there is little question that the source and ideological inspiration for them stems from the grinding conflict in Chechnya, a mostly Muslim republic the size of Connecticut that has bristled under Russian rule for centuries.
The second war there since the collapse of the Soviet Union began with what the Kremlin called terrorist attacks in 1999, including a raid led by Mr. Basayev into Dagestan, another neighboring republic, and a series of apartment bombings in Moscow and Volgodonsk, in southern Russia, for which officials blamed Chechnya's separatists.
But ever since Russian forces routed Chechnya's elected leadership and extended control over the republic, using methods that international and Russian human rights organizations have criticized as abusive and excessive, the separatists have increasingly turned to terror as their principle form of attack, both inside Chechnya and outside.
Chechnya's separatist political leaders have distanced themselves from the attacks, condemning them, though laying the blame for extremism on Russia's war, which has left tens of thousands dead. Ilyas Akhmadov, who has the role of the exiled separatists' foreign minister, said in a telephone interview that those in Chechnya who turn to terrorism have been "surrounded by the industry of death" and have "lost any illusion of a civilized solution."
"You must agree that the elimination of one-fourth of the population is not the struggle against terrorism," said Mr. Akhmadov, who recently won the right to asylum in the United States, referring to some estimates that 200,000 or more Chechens have died since the fighting began in 1994. "On the contrary, it is something that leads to the growth of terrorism."
He disputed Russia's claims that the separatist movement was fueled by groups like Al Qaeda, but acknowledged that foreign fighters had joined the Chechen resistance, though he said the number had been inflated by the Kremlin.
Officials have not given many details about the captors at Beslan, nor has the government cited what support they might have received. At least 30 of the attackers were reported to have been killed, and 3 suspected attackers were arrested and might provide information about this attack and others.
On Sunday night, Russian state television showed pictures of a man who is believed to have been one of the hostage takers being dragged into a room by two masked commandos. It is the first evidence provided by the Russian authorities that they captured three suspected hostage takers alive.
Officials have said the siege, like the other attacks, was masterminded by Mr. Basayev and financed by a man believed to be an Arab associated with Al Qaeda and identified as Abu Omar as-Seyf. Russian officials cited in official news reports say the attack itself was led by Magomed Yevloyev, who has been previously described as the commander of rebel forces operating in Ingushetia. After the raid in Ingushetia in June, Mr. Yevloyev was reported by officials to have been killed.
While the extent of international support may be debated, the attacks bear some trappings of Islamic militancy. Officials here in Beslan said they had found notebooks with Arabic writing, and witnesses reported hearing Arabic exhortations, though the attackers mostly spoke Russian.
They have also reflected the grisly tactics used by terrorist groups in attacks around the world: the extensive preparations, the simultaneity of attacks requiring great coordination and, especially, the use of suicide bombers, which was almost unheard of during the war from 1996 to 1999 and was rare even in the second war until the "Nord-Ost" hostage crisis. In that siege, as in the one in Beslan, women among the attackers wrapped themselves with explosives.
The careful planning evident in the school siege not only allowed the attackers to herd more than 1,000 hostages into a gymnasium. With ample stores of weapons and ammunition, including explosive projectiles that can be fired by grenade launchers and specialized sniper cartridges, the planning also allowed them to fight hundreds of Russian police, military and security forces for more than 10 hours after two explosions inside the school, which witnesses said appeared to go off accidentally, brought the crisis to its violent end.
The siege also indicated the attackers' ability to adapt to Russia's counterterrorist efforts. Among their first actions after seizing the school was to shatter the windows of the gymnasium, where they herded their captives. That, as well as the gas masks, appeared to be an effort to counter the potential use of a nerve gas during any storming of the building, as Russian commandoes did to end the "Nord-Ost" siege.
"Our analysts were surprised how well they used the 'Nord-Ost' experience," said Mr. Ignatchenko, the spokesman for the security service.
He added, "They were professionals."
Newsflash for the New York Slimes:
Just about everyone except you leftists seems to understand that al Qaeda, Chechens, jihadists, Hamaz, Hezbollah, the PLO, Iraqi insurgents and etc. are all just one large family of terrorists! This "religion of peace" crap is nonsense.
AMERICA: Read this, learn from it. It's a style they'll use when they start in on us.
I pray I'm wrong...oh how I pray.
How can one believe the New York Times, we know what liars they are when it comes to Kerry.
Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. Liars lie,, end of story.
I pray you're wrong too, but I'm afraid you're right.
Hey, presstitutes: You misspelled "genocidal terrorist filth"!
Russian Rebels ????? What the hell are they thinking?
I'm shocked they weren't referred to as "freedom fighters", the Old Gray Whore barely acknowledges that these barbarians are Muslims.
Message to Putin: Arm everyone. Even teachers and students.
The editors at the Slimes would rather drink poison than write "Islamists" or "Muslim terrorists." So we get "Russian Rebels."
Why the hell are they called "rebels"?
Because the New York Slimes doesn't view them as the enemy!
Looks like the terror war is moving to Russia, giving the US a breather. I'd say these people are being trained to attack the U.S. next. I wonder how they got NATO issue camo. I hope Russians figure out how to fight them anyway (likely with the help of Europe and the US).
The one "positive" aspect of this is the fact that Putin won't be hindered by leftist liberals in the government and media when he unleashes his fury on this Islamofascist scum, nor will be be bound by any pretense of political correctness.
For them, Bush is the enemy.
And "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", therefore the NY Slimes is the friend of AlQueda.
And "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", therefore the NY slimes is a friend of Al Queda.
BTTT
On the other hand, they've been fighting Chechnya for 10 years now. What more can they do that they haven't already tried?
Is Shamil Basayev dead?
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