Chechen Insurgency
- For more than a decade now, the lethal reach of Chechen separatist commander Shamil Basayev’s Riyad ul-Saliheen Martyrs Brigade has been repeatedly demonstrated.
- In 2004, it seized control of a school in the town of Beslan, sparking a siege that claimed 334 lives, 186 of them children. In 2002, the Brigade took 800 people hostage at the Nord-Ost theatre in Moscow, leading to the death of 129 of them. In 2009, 29 were killed when the group bombed a Moscow-bound high-speed train. In 2010, a similar attack claimed the lives of 39 commuters.
- In October 2013, Naida Asiyalova, 30, killed six persons and wounded 32 others in a suicide-bombing on a bus in Volgograd — almost identical to Dec 2013 attack where Volgograd railway station was bombed.
- The Chechen battle against a great power has, however, inspired jihadists across the world.
- History :
- In the 1700s, as imperial Russia expanded into territories until then controlled by Iran and Turkey, it faced resistance from local Muslim rulers. Then, in 1940, central Asian Islamists allied with the Nazi Germany in an effort to gain independence from the Soviet Union. The historian, Ian Johnson, has documented the United States’ subsequent sponsorship of these jihadists, seeking to use them against the Soviet Union.
- Even as the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991, a war for independence broke out between Russia and the newly formed Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. Basayev was appointed vice-prime minister of the Chechen Republic by President Aslam Maskhadov in an attempted peace deal.
- In 1999, though, he attempted to stage a coup in neighbouring Dagestan, and fighting broke out again. President Vladimir Putin’s troops laid siege to Grozny in 1999-2000, reducing it, the United Nations reportedly said, to “the most destroyed city on earth.”
- Present : From the mid-2008 though, the jihadist movement in Chechnya began to gather momentum again. In November that year, Mr. Umarov declared himself the Emir of the so-called Islamic Emirate of the Caucasus. For the past decade, Mr. Umarov has faced a determined adversary in the former warlord Ramzan Kadyrov. Helped by generous assistance from Moscow, Mr. Kadyrov has turned Grozny into an economic hub. But he has been alleged to be complicit in violence directed at human rights activists and political opponents — and criticised for shari’a laws that discriminate against women, introduced in a bid to outflank his Islamist opponents.
