Word: dagestan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Gallery, with its great art collection. Across southeastern Germany, floods have forced more than 30,000 people from their homes and killed 11. RUSSIA Aid Worker Seized A Dutch employee of the international medical aid group Médecins Sans Frontières was abducted in the republic of Dagestan in southern Russia. Peter-Arjan Erkel, 32, head of the M.S.F. mission in Dagestan, was seized by three gunmen in the suburbs of Makhachkala, the regional capital. Following the abduction, M.S.F. suspended aid work throughout Russia's North Caucasus region. Dagestan borders Chechnya, where M.S.F. and the U.N. suspended operations...
...controlled mine was detonated during a parade to mark victory over Nazi Germany. President Vladimir Putin swore vengeance on those who carried out the attack and sent the head of the Federal Security Service to investigate. The authorities blamed rebels from neighboring Chechnya, where remote-controlled mines are common. Dagestan, however, also has Islamic militants...
...dwarfed at least 10 or 12 times over in recent years by the illegal catch in the four former Soviet republics. In the first post-Soviet decade, poaching evolved into a lucrative, high-stakes business, with abundant illegal canneries and "caviar Mafias" in places like the Russian republic of Dagestan...
...Moscow has defined this war as an attempt to weed out a hard core of militant separatist guerrillas from within the wider Chechen population, and destroy it. Russia blames those militants for terrorist attacks in Russia and attempts to foment a separatist rebellion in neighboring Dagestan, as well as for the atmosphere of chaos and criminality that has prevailed in Chechnya over the past three years. But Moscow's methods in the field have been those of conventional warfare, bringing overwhelming force to bear in order to capture territory. And the art of guerrilla warfare is not to hold territory...
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...