Word: chechenization
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Building by building, street by street, the frenzied battle for control of a pile of rubble once known as Grozny continues. And the only certainty in the battle?s outcome is that it will leave hundreds of men dead. Russian and Chechen officials routinely understate their casualties, so when Moscow admitted Thursday that it has lost 23 men in the past day and the Chechen government says 45 of its fighters have died in the past week, it?s safe to assume that the streets of Grozny are littered with corpses. Russia also confirmed that one of its senior generals...
...bloody as it may be, the battle for Grozny may be primarily symbolic. "It's this medieval symbolism of planting your flag on a city and claiming you've won," says Zharakovich. "In a war against guerrilla forces, capturing a city doesn't mean anything." The bulk of the Chechen forces are already in the mountains to the south, and constant ambushes and attacks behind Russian lines signify the limits of territorial control in this war. Still, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin desperately needs a way to declare victory in the popular military campaign that he hopes will carry...
...However, Russia's indiscriminate bombardment of major cities, as well as reports of looting and an alleged massacre in the town of Alkhan-Yurt, have sapped much of the goodwill that may have existed in parts of the Chechen population. And Moscow's response to the Grozny breakout - the decision to treat all Chechen men as potential enemies - further diminishes Moscow's hopes of finding any significant support in the Chechen population. "In the first war Moscow set up 'filtration camps' to ostensibly separate civilians from militants, and there were widespread reports of torture and beatings," says Meier...
...mess has heightened the infighting among the Russian military command. The army blamed the troops of its traditional rival, the Interior Ministry, for the lapses that led to last weekend's Chechen successes. That, together with a cacophony of mixed signals from the Kremlin over how to conduct the campaign, will further sap the already diminished morale of the Russian forces. And Russia's economic woes continue to have an impact on the situation. Says Meier, "There are still stories appearing in the media every week of Russian officers in Chechnya selling weapons to the enemy...
...history of counterinsurgency warfare suggests that defeating the Chechen guerrilla forces requires a political strategy to win over the bulk of Chechnya's civilian population. Following Mao Zedong's analogy that guerrillas are fish and a sympathetic civilian population is the water in which they swim, the art of counterinsurgency is to poison the water by turning civilians against the guerrillas. And Russia had reason for optimism going into the campaign. "Many Chechens are opposed to the Islamic militants like Shamil Basayev and Khattab, who the Russians claim to be targeting," says Meier. "Even more may have been prepared...