Word: chechenization
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...standards, the rescue operation was an unexpected success. Putin made the most of it, donning a white doctor's coat to visit freed hostages at a Moscow hospital. Yet for all the claims of victory Saturday, top Kremlin leaders must face up to the security failures that let the Chechen takeover happen in the first place. While it would be "untimely" to fire the country's security chiefs right now, a top Putin aide reportedly said, the President needs to take steps to ensure that such a terrifying event does not happen again in the middle of Moscow...
Many Russians will cheer the success of the rescue. But the Chechen raid may also kindle fierce debate about Putin's war. He rose to the presidency of Russia in 2000 on a promise to restore Moscow's grip on the rebellious republic of Chechnya. For the past two years, he regularly claimed victory was all but won. As the champion of order and stability, Putin enjoyed strong public standing, while the government's harsh censorship of news from the war zone nearly a thousand miles from the capital has kept the grim realities of the stalemated conflict...
...Chechen attackers, showing every sign of determination, had made only one demand. Russia must stop the war and withdraw its troops from the mostly Muslim Caucasus republic. No, said Putin. "We will not yield to these provocations." But once complacent Muscovites were beginning to ask whether this war, like the one in Afghanistan, was worth the bloodshed. "This is the logical extension of what they have always been doing, sending our children to die senselessly," said playwright Mark Rozovsky, 65, as he waited for news of his teenage daughter Sasha, a captive inside the theater. "I don't want...
...Uncle Arbi was a role model for Movsar Barayev, the 25-year-old leader of the Chechen rebels who was killed last week after seizing more than 750 captives in a Moscow theater. Arbi Barayev, leader of the Chechen Islamic Special Units, famously oversaw the capture and beheading of four telecommunications workers--three from Britain, one from New Zealand--in Chechnya in 1998. Movsar also had an aunt in the rebel business. Khava Barayeva is revered by Chechen guerrillas for her suicide car-bomb attack on a Russian base in the family's home village of Alkhan-Yurt...
...that he had moved his base elsewhere. He may well have been already in Moscow, working on the theater attack. Some of his comrades almost certainly were. The 50-odd people with him--who dubbed themselves the 29th Suicide Division to give their group gravitas--were, according to knowledgeable Chechens, a composite team drawn from Movsar's own fighters and select members of other Chechen units. The women made up a third of the group and were probably intended to make the squad particularly potent, says a Chechen who is well versed in guerrilla tactics. It was no coincidence...