Translated material
On the edge of Chechnya
Dagestan looks less and less like a peaceful republic
The cancellation of the rock festival in Chechnya, justified by increased instability in the territories adjacent to the main rebellious republic, looks justified against the backdrop of events in Dagestan. The day before yesterday evening, deputy of the republican parliament Zubair Tataev was killed there. A few hours later, on Tuesday morning, an explosive device was discovered and neutralized in the center of Makhachkala. Employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the republic suggested that the bomb should have exploded at the moment when buses with policemen taking duty after the morning divorce would move past it. And already in the afternoon, at about 16:00 Moscow time, an explosion occurred at a police stronghold in the Kirovsky district of the city, on Aeroportovskoye Highway. According to the Republic's Ministry of Internal Affairs, three policemen were killed and three more people were injured as a result of this explosion.A series of terrorist attacks began even earlier. Last Friday, a landmine explosion in Makhachkala killed 11 people and injured about two dozen people. Among the victims were civilians, but most of the dead were soldiers of the special forces detachment of the internal troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs. Three days before this explosion, the famous political scientist Zagid Varisov was shot in his car near his own house in Makhachkala. In total, since the beginning of the year, about 70 terrorist attacks have been committed in Dagestan - these data were made public on Monday at the board of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Dagestan, after which the entire police leadership of Makhachkala resigned. The capital accounts for the majority of explosions and murders committed in the republic.
Some Dagestani observers are already expressing the idea that all the crimes committed recently can be connected in one chain. Moreover, experts loyal to the Dagestani authorities suggest that the goal of the attackers is to discredit this government and achieve a general destabilization of the situation in the southernmost Russian region. One of the supporters of this version was the political scientist Zagid Varisov, who was killed last week, who suggested that in addition to international terrorists, the internal Dagestan opposition, part of the new elite of Chechnya, and even some representatives of federal law enforcement agencies might be interested in “rocking” Dagestan.
Dagestani oppositionists, in turn, believe that explosions, murders and kidnappings are a direct consequence of the poor work of the republic’s incompetent and corrupt law enforcement system, whose leadership is trying to stay in power by demonstrating ostentatious zeal to the federal center in the fight against terrorism.
One way or another, the current series of terrorist attacks looks like a massive response from militants to the so-called “special comprehensive preventive operation” that the Ministry of Internal Affairs carried out in Dagestan starting in the first ten days of June. To carry out this operation, additional police forces and internal troops from neighboring regions were brought into Dagestan - according to the press service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, their number amounted to up to 15% of the personnel of the Dagestan police itself.
Interlocutors of Vremya Novostei in the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Dagestan openly admitted that their seconded colleagues turned out to be very useful during sweeps and passport checks: where family ties and acquaintances could embarrass a local employee, the visitors calmly performed their duty. At present, some of the “attached forces” are still in the region - in particular, the special forces soldiers who died on Friday turned out to be “assigned”.
The leadership of the Ministry of Internal Affairs at the level of the Southern Federal District does not hide concerns about the escalation of the sabotage war in Dagestan and emphasizes that in some types of crimes this republic has actually overtaken or is about to overtake Chechnya. It is not for nothing that the counter-terrorism operation is officially localized not in Chechnya, but in the North Caucasus region as a whole. By the way, the quantitative presence of the Russian military in Dagestan, although inferior to the forces concentrated in Chechnya, is also quite noticeable. Units of the Russian Ministry of Defense are located in Buinaksk, near Kizlyar and in the Derbent region. In addition to them, a marine brigade is stationed in the city of Kaspiysk, and border guards are stationed in Makhachkala and Khunzakh.
In the high-mountainous Botlikh region, which in 1999 became the scene of battles between the federals and the militants of Khattab and Shamil Basayev, a military camp is currently being built, which will soon house a special mountain rifle brigade of the Russian Ministry of Defense. The military not only becomes a target, as was the case during the May 2002 terrorist attack in Kaspiysk, but they themselves regularly participate in the hunt for terrorists. At the same time, experts warn the federal center against excessive escalation of the use of troops - the fight against terrorism according to the Chechen scenario could plunge the complex multinational region into a crisis much longer and more serious than the one that persists in Chechnya.
“On the other side of the front line” in Dagestan there is a terrorist underground, which, from the point of view of the police command, is less structured, coordinated and prepared than the Chechen one, but at the same time it is very numerous and active. The backbone of the Dagestan militants consists of the so-called Sharia jamaat, the Jennet group and several other lesser-known formations. Their total number can reach up to 2 thousand people, that is, comparable to the “official” number of militants in Chechnya, which has remained unchanged for several years.
The original composition of Sharia, according to the Dagestani police, has already been almost completely “knocked out”. But this did not stop its members from claiming responsibility for the Makhachkala explosion that occurred last Friday and threatening similar terrorist attacks in Moscow and other Russian cities. The leader of the Jennet group, Rasul Makasharipov, was considered liquidated for several months, but it has now become clear that a genetic examination of his remains did not confirm their identity: apparently, this field commander, like another Dagestani “amir” Rappani Khalilov, is still alive and remain on the warpath.