Word: secularizing
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...inviting French Muslims like Butt to take sides against that republic. The insurgents were threatening to kill two abducted French journalists unless the government rescinded the head-scarf ban. But the government refused to do so, and even though they disagree with the law, French Muslims rallied behind their secular leaders. "The drama in Iraq must not lead us to renounce this law," said Lhaj Thami Brèze, president of the Union of Islamic Organizations of France, which has ferociously denounced the ban in the past. "It's a question of legality. After all this, despite all this...
...targets in Russia. Still, the bitterness and despair engendered by the five year crackdown have seen Islamist influence grow. This is manifested in the emergence of suicide bombers, although the Chechens depart from conventional Qaeda practice by using women in this role - a habit learned, perhaps, from the secular nationalists of Sri Lanka's Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam, the movement that claims authorship of suicide bombing as a terror weapon. Simultaneous attacks on two airliners, of course, is another Qaeda operational signature...
...Putin's crackdown, which began with a full-scale military invasion of Chechnya in 1999, has not only failed to deliver on his promise to eliminate the nationalist rebellion in the largely Muslim territory; it has altered the nature of that rebellion, hardening its fighters, narrowing the differences between secular nationalists and radical Islamists, and putting the Islamists in the driving seat. Having failed to drive Russian forces out of Chechnya via guerrilla warfare, the rebels have resorted to a wider offensive in neighboring territories such as Dagestan, Ingushetia and Ossetia, and have also placed a far greater emphasis...
...insurgency is, first and foremost, a nationalist struggle to secede from Russia, and the rise of a more extremist and Islamist element within that insurgency is, in part, an effect of the often indiscriminate brutality of the Russian crackdown, and Moscow's rejection of any political dialogue with the secular-nationalist leadership under Aslan Mashkadov, whom Moscow had previously recognized as the president of Chechnya...
...cannot snuff out a politically motivated insurgency. Instead, in Chechnya - as, perhaps, in the Palestinian territories - a military response that has left open no political track to more moderate nationalist elements has tended to work in the favor of the Islamists, and broaden their influence at the expense of secular nationlalists. Indeed, Chechnya today sees elements ranging from Mashkadov and Bashayev to disparate local commanders and even bandits and gangsters in broad consensus over fighting the Russians...