Posted on 07/24/2005 6:09:07 PM PDT by Brian328i
MOSCOW A powerful explosion ripped through a half-empty carriage of a commuter train near the Dagestani town of Khasavyurt Sunday, killing a young woman and wounding several people.
Police announced the apparent terror bombing as an almost routine event, the latest of nearly 80 deadly attacks by Islamic extremists that have rocked the multiethnic mountain republic of Dagestan so far this year. The Kremlin insists the wave of attacks that threaten to unhinge Russia's mainly-Muslim Caucasus region is being orchestrated by the same global jihad groups that have struck in London and Sharm-el-Sheikh in recent days.
Many experts, however, dispute this interpretation, arguing that Moscow's handling of the still-smoldering war in next-door Chechnya, as well as local poverty and corruption, have more to do with the roots of violence here. But most agree that there has been an alarming influx of foreign jihadis into Russia's vulnerable southern underbelly over the past year.
"Our forces have captured or killed citizens of 52 countries operating with the terrorists in the north Caucasus," says Sergei Markov, a Kremlin adviser. "The enemy brings an ideology of radical Islam that seeks political power through terrorist methods."
Recent incidents, including a bath-house bombing that killed 10 Russian soldiers in the Dagestani capital of Makhachkala two weeks ago, suggest the attackers have absorbed sophisticated tactics used by jihadis in Iraq and elsewhere. A report issued last week by Igor Dobayev, an expert with the official Academy of Sciences, found that as many as 2,000 Islamist insurgents, many belonging to the Al Qaeda-linked Sharia Jamaat, are behind the wave of roadside explosions, car bombings, and assassinations.
Dagestan, with just over 2 million inhabitants belonging to 37 fractious ethnic groups, is the largest and potentially most volatile piece of the Russian Caucasus. The main pipeline for Russia's share of Caspian oil runs through the coastal city of Makhachkala. The republic governed since 1991 by Magomedali Magomedov, has an estimated 60 percent unemployment rate and salaries half the Russian average.
President Vladimir Putin made an emergency visit to Dagestan last week - kept secret until after his return to Moscow - where he ordered security to be beefed up on the southern border with Azerbaijan, but offered no public criticism of Mr. Magomedov.
"The authorities are unable to deal with the situation in Dagestan, and the state is close to panic over it," says Timur Muzayev, a regional expert with the Center of National Politics, a Moscow-based think tank. "The inner conflicts in Dagestan have now attained crisis proportions."
A secret report by the Kremlin's special envoy to the north Caucasus, Dmitry Kozak, leaked to a Moscow newspaper earlier this month, warned of the emergence of "Islamic Sharia enclaves" amid the high Caucasus peaks."Further ignoring the [social, economic, and political] problems and attempts to drive them deep down by force could lead to an uncontrolled chain of events whose logical result will be open social, interethnic, and religious conflict in Dagestan," Mr. Kozak wrote.
Many experts say the Chechnya war, which began almost 11 years ago in a bungled military effort by Moscow to put down a separatist rebellion, remains the key destabilizer of the region. Violence in Chechnya has been rising. In the past week alone a military helicopter crash killed eight soldiers, and an ambush on security forces in a previously "peaceful" town, claimed by Islamic rebels, killed 14. In recent days four Russian police have died in apparent terrorist attacks in the nearby mainly Muslim republic of Kabardino-Balkaria. "The Chechnya war is a bomb that we [the Russians] set off, and now it is exploding in all of our faces," says Anna Politkovskaya, a top Russian journalist. "Nowadays we live from one terrorist attack to the next, and in between we pretend that everything is OK."
The first Chechnya war, 1994-96, was effectively won by the nationalist, independence-seeking rebels. But experts say that since rebel president Aslan Maskhadov was killed by Russian security forces earlier this year, the Chechen insurgency is led by Islamic radicals such as Shamil Basayev, architect of a mass hostage-taking in a Moscow theater two years ago and last September's bloody school siege in Beslan. "We are no longer talking about Chechen secessionists challenging Moscow," says Mr. Markov. "Now it's radical religious ideologues who aim to destroy the unbelievers and establish an Islamic caliphate."
Mr. Basayev, along with a small army of jihadis, invaded Dagestan in 1999, but was driven back after local militias mobilized in large numbers to support Russian forces. Experts are not sure Moscow could hope for that kind of popular backing in any future emergency.
"In the [north Caucasus crisis] we can see the complete failure of Putin's policies," says Andrei Piontkovsky, director of the independent Center for Strategic Studies in Moscow. "It is a fairy tale to explain it as the work of outside factors, Islamic terrorists from the Middle East, or whatever. The truth is that internal problems are generating social unrest, which leads people to turn to Islamic ideas."
Yep, great idea. We don't work with Russia at all cause you've come up with every excuse in the book.
LOL, lets see if we can't push them into China's tent okay?
Your attitude on this subject is sad to read in print.
“I don't think we should have troops in those areas unless we were asked to send a small task force to help train or learn with/from our Russian counterparts. “ You say
The Global War On Terror is in reality a global war against Islamist radicals.
Yes, I'm well aware of that.
Bush can’t state it in those terms since this would re-energize those who say we are in a war against Muslims.
Bush stating that Islamist radicals are the focus of his efforts would come as a shock to few people. It would not energize folks against the whole, but would serve to focus who is the real problem.
Our center of gravity in the Cold War was in Europe and a few other places.
Well we agree on another obvious fact.
Our center of gravity today is in North Africa, Middle East, the Caucasus and Pakistan. Iran, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan- all deal or have dealt with terror. AQ, Hammas, Hezbollah and and and have there shop set up there. Even the bombers in London, Madrid came from there or were trained there. This is the new center of gravity. It is where we are fighting the GWOT, our new Cold War.
Yes, so far so good, except one point. I don't think our troops on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan would agree that this is a cold war. Neither would I.
Ignoring it, won’t make it go away.
I suppose this comment implies that you think I was advocating we ignore something. Please point out where I advocated we ignore current operations. You had made a comment something to the affect that Russia wouldn't want our troops on their territory or some such. I agreed and stated that I had not intended for us to send in large contingents of troops to their territory.
It would be like not going for a mammogram because you’re afraid they may find something.
The problem will not go away through ignoring it like Clinton did (WTC 1993, Kohbar towers, USS Cole, US embassies…….)
As with the Communist threat years ago, we have a real threat out there that must be dealt with. We need to be in those places.
I believe you have your wires crossed. I never advocated we withdraw from Middle-Eastern and Asian involvement.
While the comments you made at some points were somewhat accurate, they didn't address what my comment was expressing. You came up with an alternate meaning and went off on that. Here is the sentence I was responding too with the comment you responded to.
Do you really think we could have US troops in Kyrgyzstan (Where there are still Russian bases as well!), Uzbekistan or the Rep. of Georgia without the Russian approval?
The answer to this question was fairly obvious. I never suggested we send in troops uninvited. I never advocated we send in troops at all. What I suggested was that we form a closer alliance with Russia so that we could help them and they could help us with a common problem, TERRORISM.
Terrorists don't operate in a void. They network across borders. Terrorists toward the south of Russia have contacts outside that region. Learning more about Russia's problem areas would be helpful with regard to groups we're already tracking.
I agree with you.
Don't take my liking in writing long posts as me disagreeing.
However, I just wanted to point out that we are different from the Russians in how we operate. What our desired end states are and sometimes even our national interests collide, as they did in Iraq, where they would have preferred the “status quo” at our cost. Working together should also not mean that we sponsor activities that violate our code of conduct.
“Yes, so far so good, except one point. I don't think our troops on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan would agree that this is a cold war. Neither would I.” You say
I spent 15 consecutive months in Iraq on OIF1 from April 03 until July 04. I see it just as that, a new Cold War! So do many others.
My dad came in the USAF in 1965 and he went through the Cold War retiring in 1988. During this “COLD” War we had people die flying planes into Berlin (The stage opened with the Berlin Airlift), Korea (Supported by the Chinese and Russians), Vietnam (Supported by the Chinese and Russians), Afghanistan, Angola, Grenada, Cuba and elsewhere. The Cold War was NEVER that “cold.” The Cold War was a war against a paradigm known as communism. The media then as today was not able to put two and two together, focused on scandals, had a pro left orientation (Rather, LA Times, NYT, do I need to say more?), and was short sighted - always only focusing on today, never seeing the big picture.
In Vietnam, Americans died at the hands of SA-2 missiles that brought down several B52s. SA-6, MIG-21, MIG-17, RPG7 and other equipment was pumped into Vietnam by our enemies who in Korea even flew some of those fighters. This equipment was not manufactured in Vietnam. Vietnam was part of the Cold War, a battlefield where the West met the East and we fought it out. There is a whole list of these wars where we fought on a third parties territory.
The RAF (Terrorists), Communist Revolutionary, Lit Path (Or shining Path) in Peru and several others just vaporized after the wall fell. Why do you think? Shear coincidence that a lot of the explosives used by some of these organizations were East Block of origin? No.
Today we have a similar situation. It’s a war that the masses in the US can’t quite understand. It’s a war that will take DECADES (The Cold War took 42 years) and is in reality a battle against a “way of thinking.” Iraq is but one battlefield in this new war. There have been and will be others. However, if we win Iraq, the enemy will take a massive blow and this ordeal will end sooner rather than later. In the end, we will win either way.
Today we have forces in:
http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?storyID=123011064 (Sudan)
http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?
section=&article=28739&archive=true (Niger, where SF is also conducting training missions)
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/2/27/144331.shtml (Rep. of Georgia)
http://newsfromrussia.com/world/2004/07/17/55052.html (Kyrgyzstan)
Afganistan, Iraq, Sinai and and and.
We are building new bases in Bulgaria and Romania and are shutting down in Germany. Nice and close to our new Center of Gravity. Our new Advanced Combat Uniform is designed for what area do you think?
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ground/acu.htm
But as in the Cold War, the MSM only talks about Iraq, Iraq, Iraq.
Red6
We should do a Leveraged Buyout of Russia.
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