Even if India, China and Russia cooperate, there is unlikely to be an improvement unless the Chechen and Uyghur rebels are denied support and refuge in the parts of Afghanistan controlled by the Afghan Taliban
It is hardly surprising that both ter
rorism and Afghanistan featured in
the talks between the Foreign Ministers of India, Russia and China at Beijing on February 2. Of the three, India has been the worst victim, having had to cope with Pakistan-sponsored terrorism since the 1980s. Russia has been a target of Islamist terrorism spawned by the secessionist movement in Chechnya where it has had to fight two wars - from 1994 to 1996 and 1999 to 2009 - and from where terrorists have been travelling to Afghanistan and tribal areas to join other terrorist groups and undergo training. The second war, which began with a Chechen invasion of the Russian Republic of Dagestan in August 1999 was immediately followed by a burst of terror strikes that included one on a shopping arcade and another on an apartment building, in August and September respectively. September 1999 also witnessed two bombings in Dagestan and another in the southern Russian city of Volgodonsk. The five strikes together killed nearly 300 civilians. The result was the second Russian invasion of Chechnya. Terror strikes continued. A bomb blast killed 41 persons, including 17 children, during a military parade in the south-western town of Kaspiysk in May 2002. In October of the same year, Chechen terrorists seized Moscow's Dubrovka theatre during a performance and took about 700 hostages, over 120 of whom died, besides many terrorists, in an operation by Russian Special Forces (Spetsnaz) who used a narcotic gas to disable the hostage takers. In December of the same year, twin suicide bombings killed 83 persons at the headquarters of Chechnya's Government at Grozny. The most devastating attack, however, occurred in September 2004 when, ordered by their leader, Shamil Basayev (subsequently killed in 2006), 32 militants, of whom only three or four were Chechens, attacked a school in Beslan, a town in North Ossetia, and held it for three days before all the terrorists except one, were killed. More than 300 people, most of them children, also perished. Basayev's death, often attributed to Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, hit the movement hard but it seemed to have recovered much of its momentum in 2008. According to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Washington DC, from 795 in that year, incidents of terrorist violence rose to 1,100 in 2009 in North Caucasus where Chechnya is located. The majority of these occurred in Chechnya. Exceptions included perhaps the most serious of these - the attack on Nevsky Express travelling between Moscow and St Petersburg on November 27. According to a revised Russian Government statement, 27 persons were killed. More followed. In March 2010, two women suicide bombers detonated bombs in a Moscow metro station killing 39 people.Two days later, two bomb explosions killed at least 12 people in the town of Kizlyar, in Russia's North Caucasus. On January 24, 2011, suicide bombing in the arrival area of Moscow's Domodedovo International Airport killed at least 37 people and injured 180. Notwithstanding these attacks, the Russians seem to have stabilised the situation in Chechnya proper with the help of Ramzan Kadyrov, who became President in February 2007 nearly three years after his father, Akhmad Kadyrov, was killed in a terrorist strike in May 2004. In 2009, the then Russian President, Mr Dmitry Medvedev and younger Mr Kadyrov jointly declared that the insurgency had been crushed and Russian counter-insurgency operations in the Chechen Republic would end. Far from ending, terrorism and insurgency have spread to the neighbouring Dagestan and Ingushetia, both subject republics of the Russian Federation. Indeed the whole of Northern Caucasia, to which both these republics as well as Chechnya belong, has become a ferocious conflict zone with a new generation of fundamentalist Islamist terrorists fighting to establish a hard-line "Caucasus Emirate". According to one estimate 529 persons were killed and 457 wounded in North Caucasus in 2013.
The last year not only saw an Islamist terrorist strike in Grozny, the seat of Chechnya's Government on December 4, which killed 11 terrorists and 14 law enforcement officers but also the Islamic State casting its dark shadow on the region releasing, on August 31, videos threatening to liberate Chechnya and the broader North Caucasus region where, indications are, it is increasingly popular.
In fact, an estimated 2,500 Chechens and other Caucasians are fighting alongside the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. |
