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Faced with a deepening personnel crisis within its military, Russia is scrambling to find fighters for its war in Ukraine and recruiting heavily from its North Caucasus region to form new units along ethnic lines who are then deployed with minimal training. Regional officials from Daghestan, Ingushetia, and Kalmykia have announced plans to form rifle companies that are each made up of soldiers from a particular Russian republic. According to reporting by Caucasus.Realities, a regional news outlet of RFE/RL’s North Caucasus Service, these national units are formed primarily of contract soldiers who have previous military training and have been targeted...

Attacks by unknown assailants have killed three policemen in Daghestan. Gunmen fatally shot a police investigator in his car outside his home in Daghestan's capital, Makhachkala, on February 3. Local authorities say two bombs then exploded as a police convoy headed to the site, killing two police officers. The blast also damaged regional Interior Minister Adilgerey Magomedtagirov's car, but the minister was unhurt. Daghestan has long been afflicted with violence by criminals and militants.

A report from the city of Khasavyurt, Daghestan On Monday, January 30th, no one in Khasavyurt needed an alarm clock. The city woke up like a barracks. At 5:30 a grenade launcher blasted. Once. After a pause, given so that everyone could realize that this time, thankfully, it missed, another blast. Then a third, again from the grenade launcher. Later you stop counting. Why? This is how in the special operations in the Caucasus begin, when parts of a residential area together with whoever is dug in there are destroyed in the hunt for ‘fighters’. The grenade launcher has long...

16 December 2005 -- The head of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) confirmed today that an alleged Al-Qaeda leader in southern Russia has been killed. Nikolai Patrushev told reporters that Saudi-born Abu Omar al-Seif was killed in the Northern Caucasus republic of Daghestan last month. Al-Seif's death had earlier been reported by Russian media but had not been officially confirmed. The FSB says al-Seif arrived in the Northern Caucasus 10 years ago on the orders of Osama bin Laden. It says he ran the Al-Haramein Islamic Foundation as a cover for setting up a terrorist network in Chechnya, Ingushetia, and...

Two mountain brigades will be deployed in the North Caucasus to cover Russia's southern borders, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a meeting with senior officials from the country's military and security services in Daghestan. "The whole section of the border from Astrakhan (northwest Caspian's) to Azerbaijan must be closed and properly protected," Putin said. Putin said millions of Russian citizens spent their vacations in the resorts of Krasnodar Region (Black Sea), and the area had to be protected. The president said the move would help police fight criminal groups. The president said that organized crime in the region must...

The Religious Roots of Conflict: Russia and Chechnya By David Damrel There is something basic missing from most Western commentary on Russia’s ferocious war against the secessionist Chechen Republic: the Chechens themselves. While many analysts ponder Yeltsin’s pursuit of his costly, unpopular war in the Caucasus or ask how the international community should respond to Russia’s decimation of Grozny, the Chechens--who call themselves the Nokhchi--appear as little more than an unexplored foil to the Russians. But what sustains just under a million Muslim Chechens in their improbable resistance to Russian might? What are the religious dimensions of the conflict? How...

MAKHACHKALA, OCTOBER 12 /from RIA Novosti's Dekabr Beibutov/ - Two caches of weapons and ammunitions have been discovered at the Botlikh sector of the administrative border between Daghestan and Chechnya. Colonel Abdulmanat Musayev, chief of the press service of Daghestan's Interior Ministry, said Saturday that last Friday, interior troops and police discovered a camouflaged 73-mm artillery gun in the Vedeno district of Chechnya. Apart from that, according to him, another cache containing 8 hand anti-tank grenade launchers, 5 rounds to them, and 60 underbarrel grenade launcher rounds were discovered in the area of the Kenkhi settlement in the Shatoi district...

MOSCOW: Russia was "a step away" from a civil war in September 1999 when Islamic militants, allegedly sponsored by Osama Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network, invaded Daghestan from neighbouring Chechnya, President Vladimir Putin said on Saturday. "At the time of incursion of Chechen militants into Daghestan in Sept 1999 a serious thought was given to mass mobilisation in the country, which would have put Russia a step away from a civil war," he was quoted as saying by Radio Mayak at a Kremlin meeting with distinguished school teachers. Putin, who was at that time chief of FSB security service...