Word: chechen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Chechnya, terrorism may be in the eyes of the beholder. Russian forces, purportedly on a campaign against Chechen terrorists, fired missiles into a crowded market place and a maternity home in Grozny Thursday, reportedly killing more than 100 civilians. Although Moscow denied that any civilians had died in what it called a strike on an arms depot, Western reporters inside Grozny reported seeing scores of broken bodies strewn across the marketplace and the corpses of a large number of women and babies at the maternity home. The U.S. expressed concern over the civilian casualties, and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin held...
Half a league, half a league, half a league onward... Flushed with their success in capturing Chechnya?s northern plains, Russian troops Friday pressed forward their offensive south of the Terek River with their sights firmly set on a triumphant march into Grozny, the Chechen capital. But they could be heading into a trap. "The Chechens are well-armed and well-organized, and they?re just waiting for the Russians to come onto more favorable terrain," says TIME Moscow correspondent Andrew Meier. "They haven?t made much effort to resist Moscow?s offensive on the northern flatlands, where they...
...efforts to avoid repeating its 1994-96 debacle in Chechnya, its campaign appears to lack coordination and coherence. "This has disaster written all over it," says Meier. "It?s the wrong time of year to be getting drawn into an offensive, and Moscow has rebuffed attempts at negotiation by Chechen president Mashkadov, who remains the territory?s most credible moderate leader. It looks as if there?s very little coordination among Russia?s political leaders and its generals, and there?s no long-term strategy evident." To be sure, analysts agree that a battle for Grozny would lead to massive...
...Moscow, and they claim to have learned from their previous failures. More important, they claim to have learned from NATO's almost casualty-free successes in Kosovo. Last week, before a blackout descended on military news, Moscow TV carried cockpit footage of a Russian smart missile destroying its Chechen target. It'll be a nice short offensive, General Valery Manilov of the General Staff declared cheerfully. If the troops move "energetically," he predicted, "we won't have to winter there...
Russian commanders have, in fact, learned nothing at all since the first Chechnya war. Officers and NCOs who took part in battles last month against Chechen rebels in western Dagestan described their own commanders as corrupt, ill-organized and incompetent. Sources close to the Spetsnaz, the best-trained and most combat-experienced soldiers, say they lost officers to misdirected Russian "precision bombings" in Dagestan. They also speak of corrupt commanders who allowed Chechen leader Basayev to buy his way out of Dagestan after a failed offensive, and of helicopter-gunship crews who were bribed by the Chechens to hit empty...