Word: chechenization
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President Vladimir Putin faced rising criticism Monday as Russians digested the cost of Saturday's dramatic hostage rescue. Medical authorities have revealed that all 115 hostages who died on Saturday when Russian special forces stormed a Moscow theater to end a three-day siege by Chechen gunmen were killed not by their captors, but by a mystery gas used to subdue the terrorists. Russian officials expressed regret over the casualties, but emphasized that their intervention had saved the bulk of the 700 hostages the Chechens were planning to kill - and they refused to disclose the type of gas used...
...Although President Vladimir Putin immediately linked the siege with the global war on terrorism, and charged that the action was planned in a "foreign terrorist center," its roots more likely lie in a long-established tradition among Chechen insurgents of mounting dramatic terror strikes aimed at tilting the balance of power back in their favor. The latest siege is reminiscent of the hostage drama at Budennovsk in 1995, when Chechen rebels led by Shamil Basayev seized a Russian hospital in order, he later said, to make Russians suffer the way Chechens had suffered. Although 166 hostages died when the very...
...Chechnya has been ongoing, with large numbers continuing to die on both sides. And the fact that a heavily armed group of this size was able to travel undetected from the Caucasus to the capital may increase Russian skepticism of the efficacy of military efforts to extinguish the Chechen rebellion...
...Russian leader is not wrong about links between the Chechen insurgency and al-Qaeda: Arab volunteers have long fought in Chechnya under a Saudi commander known simply as Khattab (killed in action earlier this year), who had fought in Afghanistan and was believed to have been close to Osama bin Laden. And a few score al-Qaeda operatives took refuge alongside Chechen fighters hiding in Georgia last winter. Even there, however, there were clear differences - the al-Qaeda operatives urging the Chechens to attack Western targets in Russia, while many local Chechen commanders showed little interest in global 'jihad,' seeing...
...increasingly desperate to break Russia's stranglehold on its home turf. But Moscow is unlikely to be forced back to negotiating by terror attacks. The standoff is more likely to amplify Russia's demand for a green light from the West to act against NATO-friendly Georgia, where many Chechen fighters continue to find sanctuary...