Worsening world

First Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs blown up in Ingushetia

“He was one of the few who really and recklessly opposed terrorism,” senator from the republic Issa Kostoev said about the deceased Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of Ingushetia Dzhabrail Kostoev. “This was not the first attempt on Kostoev’s life, but, despite constant threats, Dzhabrail fought the bandits not in words and wore shoulder straps not for the sake of beauty and glory.”

After the protracted holidays, the war in the Caucasus again leaked into the news. Between May Day and Victory Day, alarming reports came about a clash between the military and militants on the Chechen-Dagestan administrative border. Already this Tuesday, there was a battle with terrorists for several hours in one of the residential areas of the Dagestan Kizil-Yurt. One policeman was killed, several more were wounded, but two militants were killed. According to the official version, one of them found a plan for Kizil-Yurt school No. 7, which the bandits wanted to capture. If there really was a plan, we can only assume that the rest of the militants are continuing their terrible work somewhere - it is unlikely that the dead were going to seize the school together.

On the eve of summer, it again turned out that there are enough militants in the Caucasus - despite reports from police and military commanders of various ranks, from which it follows that peaceful life is being hampered by only a few dozen particularly persistent attackers who will certainly be caught or killed in the very near future. The day after a 12-hour battle in the Dagestan Kizil-Yurt, in Ingushetia, a deputy police minister dies in a collision with a car bomb. When they were still shooting in Kizil-Yurt, the Chechen authorities showed the television cameras machine guns and grenade launchers from yet another opened cache. But “pacified” Chechnya only on TV looks like a “springhead” of peace between the “unreliable” Dagestan and Ingushetia. Yesterday in the Kurchaloevsky district a police convoy was shot at - according to the first data, four policemen were killed and four more were wounded.

These murdered policemen will most likely not be shown on TV - unlike the confiscated guns stacked in a row, they testify not to peace, but to the war that is still spreading from Chechnya throughout the region. The “talking heads” of the regional operational headquarters for managing the counter-terrorism operation are constantly trying to explain that the opposite is true - that with the onset of spring, militants from neighboring regions have flocked to peaceful Chechnya and are creating a threat to the exemplary peace there. They apparently believe that the neighboring regions, struggling to stay on the edge of the Chechen “world,” have so far received little attention from the Russian military authorities.

Dagestan and Ingushetia are having a hard time. The militants, as at the beginning of the second Chechen war, view them as primary targets, and the federal command, which at the expense of Ramzan Kadyrov has removed itself from responsibility for the situation in Chechnya, is inclined to blame them for the fact that police officers are still being killed there.

“The bandits committed a serious crime, but the situation in the republic remains calm and is completely controlled by the authorities,” said President of Ingushetia Murat Zyazikov after the death of Dzhabrail Kostoev. “Law enforcement agencies are taking all necessary actions aimed at solving this terrorist attack.” Probably, law enforcement agencies will have many versions of what happened. Whichever of them turns out to be true, if in the capital of the republic the deputy minister and the head of the police of this very capital die from the explosion of a car bomb, it is difficult to call it peace.

The prosecutor of Ingushetia, Makhmud Kalimatov, says that the only version so far is that the deputy minister was killed for his work, which he tried to do on principle. It wasn't the first time they tried to kill him. According to the latest Caucasian traditions, a list of attempts on a policeman’s life can well be considered proof of his integrity. Officials say nothing about the integrity of the policemen who were killed the first time over the last two days in Kizil-Yurt and near Kurchaloi. But sometimes it seems that there are really few of them who are principled, as the Ingush senator said. As if there were no fewer of them than the remaining militants in the peaceful communications of the command.

Ivan SUKHOV