Word: caucasus
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This applies in particular to the terrorists known in Russia as the Black Widows, a name that plays on their alleged desire to avenge the deaths of their husbands (or other relatives) at the hands of Russian security forces working in the North Caucasus. In recent years, they have taken part in several vicious attacks in Moscow, including the bombings of two passenger planes in 2004 that killed 89 people. Abdurakhmanova, named by police as one of the two suicide bombers who struck the Moscow subway system on March 29, killing at least 40 people, seems to fit the mold...
...Russian security forces] are violent with us, and we have the right to act out in violence against them, to defend ourselves and our relatives. So this idea, this word terrorist, when it is applied to people fighting in the Caucasus, is an artificial word that was made up to discredit the resistance," she said. After describing how she took up arms in 1993 against Russian-backed forces in Abkhazia, a disputed region of Georgia, she added, "We lose our men and we choose to fight back. Does that make us terrorists...
...eyes of the Russian state and the international community, it certainly does if the attacks are of the kind Moscow experienced on Monday. Yet the vendettas that Giorgberidze described are widespread throughout the Caucasus, parts of which have been ruled from Moscow in one way or another for two centuries. That history of subjugation, along with the desperate poverty afflicting most of the region, helps explain the apparent ease with which insurgents have been able to recruit new fighters, both men and women. As a result, violent incidents in the North Caucasus jumped from 281 in the summer...
...However, peace didn't come to the entire North Caucasus - many insurgents simply moved over into the neighboring regions of Dagestan and Ingushetia, where terrorism attacks and assassinations continued. Then, last August, Umarov pledged to take the war to the Russian heartland, and in December he followed up on the threat, taking responsibility for a gruesome attack on a train from Moscow to St. Petersburg, which killed 27 well-to-do Russians, including three mid-level government officials. Yet the Kremlin still stuck to its normalization plan for the North Caucasus. For instance, Medvedev in January appointed a business-savvy...
...even Medvedev, the country's leading liberal, has begun to take the tone of a belligerent, tweeting on Monday, "We have to continue fighting the terrorists without pleasantries, liquidating them without emotion or hesitation." This suggests that a new security regime could be on its way to the North Caucasus. Such a response could mark another turning point in the long-running conflict - and runs the risk of renewing a quagmire the government thought it was finally starting to escape...