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Rusudan Giorgberidze, vice chairwoman of the Free Caucasus resistance movement, said she has little doubt that the Russian government intends to "tighten the screws" on the North Caucasus after top security officials blamed Monday's attacks on Islamist rebels from the region. (So far, no group has claimed responsibility for the attacks.) But that move, she added, will likely only spur a cycle of retaliation. "In the face of a regime that rules by increasingly persistent clampdowns and raids, a person who tries to defend himself does not think of himself as an insurgent. Excuse me, but that is simply...
Giorgberidze's perspective as a former resistance fighter and a woman has special relevance in the wake of Monday's attacks, which were carried out by two female suicide bombers who were linked in the Russian media to the notorious "black widows" of the North Caucasus. These are the women who have carried out a string of suicide bombings in Russia in recent years, most notably in 2004, when they struck two passenger planes taking off from Moscow, killing 89 people. They also took part in the Moscow theater siege of 2002 that claimed more than 100 lives. Their motivation...
...Moscow in one way or another for two centuries. That history of subjugation, along with the desperate poverty afflicting most of the region, helps explain the apparent ease with which insurgents have been able to recruit new fighters, both men and women. As a result, violent incidents in the North Caucasus jumped from 281 in the summer of 2008 to 470 a year later, according to the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. (See "The Man Behind Russia's Deadly Train Blast...
...However, peace didn't come to the entire North Caucasus - many insurgents simply moved over into the neighboring regions of Dagestan and Ingushetia, where terrorism attacks and assassinations continued. Then, last August, Umarov pledged to take the war to the Russian heartland, and in December he followed up on the threat, taking responsibility for a gruesome attack on a train from Moscow to St. Petersburg, which killed 27 well-to-do Russians, including three mid-level government officials. Yet the Kremlin still stuck to its normalization plan for the North Caucasus. For instance, Medvedev in January appointed a business-savvy...
...even Medvedev, the country's leading liberal, has begun to take the tone of a belligerent, tweeting on Monday, "We have to continue fighting the terrorists without pleasantries, liquidating them without emotion or hesitation." This suggests that a new security regime could be on its way to the North Caucasus. Such a response could mark another turning point in the long-running conflict - and runs the risk of renewing a quagmire the government thought it was finally starting to escape...