Word: beslan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Chechnya is mutating into an Islamist jihad as it spills across the region. Russian officials have regularly dismissed rebel threats to expand the war. Yet over the past two years fighting has progressed west from Chechnya to Ingushetia and North Ossetia, where last year hundreds died in the Beslan school siege. In the past 12 months, there have been almost daily attacks in Dagestan to the east. Now, the insurgency has moved north into Kabardino-Balkaria. Chechen secessionist websites hailed what they called a successful operation by the "Kabardino-Balkaria section of the Caucasus Front," praising it as proof that...
...should I repudiate a successfully conducted operation?" SHAMIL BASAYEV, Chechen rebel leader, on the school attack he plotted in Beslan, Russia a year ago last week, which killed 320 people
...tank shells had been used, details that had previously been denied. Russian officials say these weapons did not cause the fire in the school, and tanks were called in only after all the surviving hostages had been freed. Kesayev, who was in the Russian emergency command center in Beslan throughout the crisis, also claims that the Kremlin deliberately failed to respond to an offer by moderate Chechen guerrilla leader Aslan Maskhadov (killed by Russian special forces in March) to negotiate the hostages' release. That assertion is supported by a former Russian official who was also in the Beslan command center...
...Meanwhile, the war in Chechnya drags on, promising more horrors to come. Last week, a new underground government was announced with Basayev, widely believed to have planned Beslan, named first deputy premier. Asked recently if there could be more Beslan-style attacks, Basayev answered: "Of course...
...Beslan itself, there's little mention of Basayev or the government inquiry. "We will never know who was behind the raid," says one of the teachers as she makes final preparations for the start of the new school year and, hopefully, the return of at least a semblance of normality. Life goes on, but everyone in this battered, brokenhearted town knows that nothing will ever really be normal again...