Middle East Intelligence Bulletin
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  Vol. 2   No. 6 Table of Contents
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1 July 2000 


Suicide Operations in Chechnya: An Escalation of the Islamist Struggle
by Reuven Paz

Reuven Paz is the Academic director of The International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, Israel, and a senior visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in Washington DC. He has specialized in research of Islamic movements and Palestinian society.

Khattab

On June 1, the president of the breakaway republic of Chechnya reportedly held a meeting with his top commanders and ordered them to inaugurate a new phase in the struggle against Russian forces. Shortly thereafter, Islamist militants trained in explosive operations by "Khattab," the commander of the so-called Arab Afghans in Chechnya, launched two suicide operations and several daring commando operations that have shocked Moscow.

     On June 7, an unknown man and a young Chechen Muslim woman by the name Hawaa Barayev drove a truck loaded with explosives through a checkpoint of an OMON (Russian Special Forces) base at Alkhan-Yurt in Chechnya and detonated a suicide bomb outside a barracks, killing two soldiers and wounding five others, according to official Russian news agencies. After the explosion, rebels in a nearby forest opened fire, suggesting the possibility that the explosives were set off by remote control, rather than by the suicide bombers themselves. Barayev was a cousin of Arbi Barayev, a prominent rebel field commander.

     The official web site of the rebels (http://www.qoqaz.net) later published a statement noting that the operation, which it said claimed the lives of 27 Russian soldiers, was not just a message to Moscow, but "a message to the Muslims" as well. "It was a cry that said no to the crimes against the Muslim Ummah, but will the people of the Ummah heed this call and rush to support their brothers and sisters who are in need? Will the hearts of the believers come alive with this example of pure faith and courageous sacrifice?"

     Another suicide operation was carried out on June 11 at a checkpoint in Khankala by a former Russian soldier who had converted to Islam and joined the rebels. The soldier, identified only as "Abdul Rahman" by the Islamists, detonated the explosives moments after a federal convoy passed through the checkpoint. Two OMON senior sergeants were killed in the operation. According to Russia's ITAR-TASS newswire, the driver was named Sergey Dimitriyev, and upon his conversion to Islam he adopted the name Jabrail. He was a fighter in the detachment of field commander Mazman Akhmadov and came to Chechnya in early 1999, where he received military training under the well-known Saudi (some say Jordanian) commander Khattab.

     On June 12, rebel forces in Grozny, the Chechen capital, under the command of Ramadan Akhmadov, succeeded in planting and detonating explosives in an army vehicle without the knowledge of the Russian soldier who drove it. An earlier explosion at an army base in Volgograd on June 1, for which no one has so far claimed responsibility for it, has also been widely attributed to the rebels. ITAR-TASS reported on June 10 that the Russian forces dismantled 130 explosive devices in a single day on June 8; over 10,300 devices have been discovered in Chechnya since the since August 2, 1999. So far there have been no terrorist attacks on the scale of last fall, when several apartment buildings in Moscow were bombed, perhaps because the rebels wish to promote their image as guerrilla warriors and freedom fighters, not terrorists.

     From the Russian point of view, this escalation is a result of the much more militant stand of the new president Vladimir Putin, who is doing lately his best to get the approval of the US and Western-European countries to launch a wide-scale air attacks in Chechnya and Afghanistan. The Russians are flooding the news agencies with allegations that the Chechen rebels constitute an "Islamist International" on Russian soil, actively backed by exiled Saudi dissident Bin Laden and receiving logistical support from the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. On June 15, President Putin declared in Berlin that "an international network of terrorists, which is financed from abroad, is using Chechnya as a bridgehead to attack Russia" and asked for the "moral support" of Europe in combating terrorists in the Caucasus.

     The Russian government daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta claimed on June 6 that several Russian banks have accused the French bank Credit Agricole Indosuez of having "close links with Islamic fundamentalists in Chechnya, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan." According to information from unofficial Russian sources, the French bank was an "active participant in transferring cash money to accounts of Al-Haramayn, an Islamic charitable organization that gives financial assistance to Islamic extremists all over the world, including Chechnya." The French bank was also said to be in contact with organized crime groups in Chechnya that have attempted to undermine Russian banks.

     The escalation is probably also a result of the Islamists' successes in the past year and the increasing Russian losses. According to a report of the Russian nongovernmental news agency Interfax on June 8, 2,357 Russian soldiers and policemen were killed and 6,888 wounded since the start of the anti-terrorist operation in the Northern Caucasus on August 2, 1999. It should be noted that the proportion between killed and wounded security servicemen is 1:3, a very high ratio compared to any violent conflicts in the world. The transfer of more elite and Special Forces to Chechnya since October seems to have had only a marginal impact on the fight with the Islamist groups.

     In another article published by Rossiyskaya Gazeta on June 1, analyzing the increasing terrorism in Chechnya, the Russians indirectly admitted their difficulties in coping with the Chechen Islamists. But the article quoted "specialists in this field" as saying that "the solution can only be to mount a comprehensive operation with troops and special sub-units wiping out bandit groups in the mountains and Special-Purpose police detachments, and the police catching them on the plain and in cities and villages." It seems that Moscow is trying to prepare the Russian public for an increase in its operations in Chechnya that will no doubt entail a higher price in human losses. So far, significant public opposition to the war has not materialized, as it did between 1987-1989 during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, but internal criticism in Russian society does exist.

A New Russian Policy in Chechnya

In addition to the preparation of Russian and international public opinion for an escalation in its anti-terrorist campaign in Chechnya (and maybe even Afghanistan), Putin has also taken new administrative steps in Chechnya. On June 8, he issued a decree to establish a temporary system of executive power in the Chechen Republic loyal to Moscow. Chechen Mufti Akhmed Kadyrov was appointed head of the republic.

     Kadyrov served from 1994-1996 with the anti-Russian forces in Chechnya and took part in military operations. But since the cease-fire in 1996 he supported the peace with Russia and expressed severe opposition to Maskhadov and the Islamist extremists. Maskhadov declared Kadyrov "the number one enemy" and sentenced him to death. Upon his appointment, Kadyrov resigned from his religious post, but is believed to have significant support from the local Islamic establishment. The chairman of the Mufti Council of Russia, Sheikh Ravil Gainutdin, stated that "should the state permit [it] Kadyrov might head both the religious and secular power in Chechnya." The appointment of a distinguished religious figure, which seems to enjoy wide support among the Chechen public, seems to be an answer to the Islamist ideology of the rebels. Kadyrov was welcomed by Daghestan too, since "he was the first to denounce the invasion of Basayev and Khattab into Daghestan and called them enemies of Islam." According to a report by Interfax on June 15, three of the rebels' field commanders have visited Kadyrov in the last days in an attempt to open a process of mediation. Kadyrov has also declared his intention to employ former officials of Maskhadov regime in his administration.

Conclusions

The Russian Chechen policy under Putin seems to be directed along two lines: on one hand, there is an attempt to reach a peaceful solution to the Chechnya conflict through the establishment of a new administration that will bring about a decline in public support for the Islamists and force them to reconcile with Moscow. On the other hand, there has been a concerted campaign to lay responsibility for the violence on Afghanistan and the Taliban, perhaps with the goal of achieving international support for large-scale military operations and air attacks against the Taliban. By doing so, Putin is actually admitting that there is no purely military solution for dealing with the Islamist rebels. On June 5-6, the Russian Interior Minister Vladimir Rushailo visited Israel and held talks on "the prospects for the cooperation in struggle against international terrorism in general, and the Islamist in particular." He tried to persuade his Israeli counterparts that "the problem of Chechen terrorism cannot be viewed as purely Russian" and has international aspects. However, the Israeli government is reluctant to deal with this problem in order to avoid opening new fronts of Islamist terrorism against Israeli or Jewish targets. Furthermore, it seems these days that Israel's advice to the Russians stems from its experience with terrorism emanating from Lebanon, which could not be eradicated by military force.

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