Insurgency in the North Caucasus: changes in tactics in 2006-2011

In 2006, several months before he was killed in an explosion, Basayev reorganized the military structure of the Chechen insurgents. Previously, they had been a rather conventional military organization with brigades, regiments, battalions, the Ministry of Sharia’s state security, and even an antiterrorist center. Faced with Russian squads carrying out extrajudicial killings, Chechens shifted from a quasi-military structure to a system of small three- to five-person groups tasked with attacking Russian law enforcement personnel.

In November 2006 Ali Taziev (nom-de-guerre Magas), an Ingush commander, stated in an interview on a separatist Web site that the formation of such groups was designed“to target specific people and to prepare and execute military operations for their elimination.”

These changes were confirmed by the authors’ sources in the Russian secret services, which face a new generation of militants: By 2008, Chechen youth were being drawn to jihad, replacing experienced insurgents in their mid-thirties. In October 2007 Doku Umarov, who succeeded Sheikh Abdul Halim Sadulayev (killed in June 2006) as president of the self-proclaimed Chechen republic of Ichkeria, proclaimed the Caucasus Emirate and declared himself its Amir, thereby converting the Chechen Republic into a vilayat (province) of the emirate.

Jihadist groups extended their reach beyond the borders of Chechnya to the internal republics of Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, and Dagestan. The tactic of large insurgent raids were replaced by ambushes.

Between 2007 and 2009 a number of high-ranking Russian officials were ambushed and killed by Chechen terrorists. On January 12, 2008, Colonel Anatoly Kyarov, the head of the Kabardino-Balkaria republic’s organized crime unit, was assassinated in Nalchik. On March 7, Mark Metsaev, the head of the same unit in North Ossetia, was machine-gunned to death. On June 12, 2009, General Adilgerei Magomedtagirov, Dagestan’s interior minister, was killed in the capital, Makhachkala.

The militants also returned to suicide bombing; in November 2008 a female suicide bomber killed eleven people and wounded as many as forty others in an attack in Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia, and in June 2009 a suicide bomber killed two police officers in Grozny.

On March 29, 2010, female suicide terrorism returned to Moscow: Two women from Dagestan almost simultaneously blew themselves up in the capital’s metro. The attack killed forty people.

Despite the successful operations to take out militant leaders, the number of terrorist attacks in the North Caucasus in 2010 increased several times over, which is clear proof that the emphasis on solving these problems through force alone is not justified.

According to information from the Deputy Prosecutor General, Ivan Sydoruk, since the start of 2010 there has been a four-fold increase year-on-year in the number of terrorist attacks in the North Caucasus Federal District (information released in September). According to official data from the Interior Ministry, the 11 months of 2010 in the North Caucasus saw ”609 crimes of a terrorist nature” committed, 242 members of the law enforcement agencies killed and 620 wounded, in addition to the deaths of 127 civilians.

The events of 2010 also destroyed the myth that Ramzan Kadyrov's policy against the militants was working. In addition to all the other terrorist attacks in the republic, in 2010 the “armed underground” managed to organize and carry out two serious attacks, which also carry great symbolic importance. One is the attack on Kadyrov's home village, Tsentoroi, in late August, and the other is the attack on the Chechen Parliament, which took place a month and a half later. If the official account is to be believed, Kadyrov’s men suffered only minor losses, 9 people died in the attack, but it nonetheless showed how vulnerable the Republic’s authorities were.

As well as the terrorist attacks that targeted the civilian population, and attacks on representatives of the authorities, there were frequent reports of train derailment, disrupted power transmission lines, attacks on cell phone facilities and gas pipelines. It was sheer luck that the militant attack on Baksan Hydroelectric Power Plant of June 22, 2010 did not become a large-scale tragedy, which shows that what the secret services call “the armed underground”, continues to practice carrying out attacks on strategic sites.

The PR value of these attacks is far greater than the damage done by the temporary interruption of the hydroelectric power plant’s operations: one cannot but remember the accident at the Sayano-Shushenskaya HPP, responsibility for which was claimed by the leader of the militants in the Caucasus, Doku Umarov. There was no evidence to back up that claim, but the authorities' behavior, the pressure they put on the press, including on local journalist Afanasiev, who was taken to court, and the Interfax correspondent, who was chased out of the station, merely served to increase suspicion.

On January 24, 2011 a blast ripped through the international arrivals zone of Domodedovo airport. As of 19:50 there were 35 confirmed fatalities, and dozens of wounded.

Agentura.Ru March 2011