BAKSAN,
Russia — On Friday, exactly a week before the Olympics were set to open
just 180 miles away, Russia’s security forces appeared on Makhov Street
at 8:30 a.m. and cordoned off the area around a brick and stone house.
One of the men inside called his father, who said it was the first he
had heard from his son in 10 months.
“He said, ‘Papa, we’re surrounded,' ” the father said. “ 'I know they’re going to kill us.’ Then he said farewell.”
The
Russians and the men inside exchanged gunfire, pausing only to allow a
woman and two children to leave the house. By the time the shooting
ended in the afternoon, four men inside were dead, according to official
accounts. The Russians then blew up the house, leaving a bloodied pile
of rubble and a crowd of sullen, angry neighbors.
For
the first time in history, the Olympics are being held on the edge of a
war zone. The conflict is one of the longest running in the world, a
simmering, murky battle between increasingly radicalized militants who
operate in the shadows of society and a security force that can be
brutal, even when lethally effective.
The
symbolic importance of the Games for Russia and for President Vladimir
V. Putin has turned Sochi itself into a tantalizing target for Islamic
terrorists who have vowed a wave of attacks to advance their goal of
establishing an independent caliphate across the North Caucasus.
The threat has prompted the Kremlin to mount what officials and experts have described as the most extensive security operations
in the history of sporting events, sealing off the city and conducting
months of operations like the one here to crush militant cells across a
region that stretches from Dagestan on the Caspian Sea to Sochi on the
Black Sea, using tactics that critics say only fuel more violence.
“It’s
terrifying what’s happening now: the total destruction of our youth,”
the father said, agreeing to speak only if not identified because he
feared reprisal. “Everyone is scared. Everyone is running away. Some go
to Moscow. Some further away. People start to protect themselves after
things like this.”
The Olympics have focused new attention on this country’s most-wanted terrorist, Doku Umarov, and threats of fanatical attacks like the ones in Volgograd that killed 34 people in December when suicide bombers struck mass transit.
But the war in Russia more often takes the shape of events in places
like Baksan. Rustam Matsev, a lawyer in the republic,
Kabardino-Balkaria, called it “a slow-motion civil war.”
Even
if Russia succeeds in keeping Sochi safe, the violence is certain to
grind on here in the Caucasus when international attention moves on,
nurtured by the nihilistic ideology of the international jihad and
punctuated by terrorist attacks outside the region that experts say
Russia, like other countries, will never be able to prevent completely.
“You
don’t need much to do this,” said Ekaterina Sokirianskaia, the North
Caucasus project director for the International Crisis Group. “You need a
committed jihadi and a bomb, which is quite cheap and you can make it
at home. It’s difficult to deal with.”
In
2013, violence between militants and security forces left 529 people
dead in the North Caucasus, according to a list compiled by the news
site Caucasian Knot
that does not include the attacks in Volgograd, a city farther north.
Of those killed, 127 were Russian security officers, a death toll on a
scale of the 160 soldiers who died during the same period in NATO’s war
in Afghanistan.
The
level of violence has dropped significantly since tens of thousands
died during Russia’s two wars against separatists in Chechnya, who once
hoped the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 would clear the way for
the republic’s independence. The second war, under Mr. Putin’s
leadership, lasted 10 years, but it crushed the rebels and drove the
Chechen rebel commanders underground or “into the forest.” There, they
gradually turned the cause of Chechnya’s independence into a broader,
more radical vision of holy war that has little popular support but has
nonetheless attracted adherents across the region.
Chechnya
is no longer even the deadliest republic in the region, according to
Caucasian Knot, having been surpassed in deaths and injuries last year
by some of its neighbors, notably Dagestan, now the most dangerous region in Russia; Ingushetia; and Kabardino-Balkaria.
Mr.
Umarov, who is described as Russia’s Osama bin Laden, has led the
insurgency since 2006, but his influence and operational command are now
a matter of dispute. Many officials and experts describe him as little
more than a figurehead for a diffuse constellation of terrorist cells
operating independently. Some think he might even be dead.
“For
an insurgent, he’s quite an old guy,” Ms. Sokirianskaia said. “He’s
nearly 50. He’s had many injuries. I can’t rule out that he’s dead.”
The
terrorist cells are now so small and so deeply underground that they
appear unable to undertake the sort of large-scale operations that
seared Russia early in Mr. Putin’s rule, including the siege of a theater in Moscow in 2002 and a school in Beslan in 2004, both of which involved dozens of fighters.
“There
is no real organization there,” said Mark Galeotti, an expert on
Russia’s security forces from New York University who is now conducting
research in Moscow. “There are people who are networked together.”
He
expressed doubt that Mr. Umarov would have known in advance of the
bombings in Volgograd, for example, even though a previously unknown
cell from Dagestan claimed responsibility for it last month, saying that
it was carrying out his threat last summer to attack the Games.
As
the attacks in Volgograd showed, the insurgents can still carry out
spectacular and deadly suicide attacks against “soft” targets like
trains, stations and buses, if not at will, then at least with appalling
regularity. While attacks in the Caucasus often target Russian security
operations, those outside appear intended to maximize terror by
striking at civilians. That kind of attack, rather than one in Sochi
itself, experts say, is more likely during the Olympics.
The Spread of Rebel Attacks in the North Caucasus
2000
RUSSIA
GEORGIA
CAUCASUS MOUNTAINS
Krasnodar
Krai
Chechnya
Dagestan
Ingushetia
Krasnodar
Sochi
Makhachkala
Grozny
Tblisi
Black Sea
Caspian
Sea
While suicide bombings have been a recurring tactic since the second Chechen war — giving life to the lurid mythology of the “black widows,”
women avenging the deaths of husbands, fathers, brothers or sons — the
motive has shifted, according to Ms. Sokirianskaia. Those women now, she
said, are driven less by a clear political goal than by the pursuit of
martyrdom and heavenly reward.
Paradoxically,
the most radicalized vision of an Islamic insurgency has little appeal
among the majority of people in the region. There is no cult of
martyrdom here except online. While the region is overwhelmingly Muslim,
few appear to support either the goal of separatism or the imposition
of an explicitly Islamic form of government.
The
actions of the Russian security officers, however, fuel resentment, as
do ethnic tensions and impoverishment. In Kabardino-Balkaria’s capital,
Nalchik, a sense of disenfranchisement resulted in an uprising against security forces in 2005 that resulted in 135 deaths.
Muslim Presence in the Region
The North Caucasus has been in turmoil since the breakup of
the Soviet Union in the 1990s. The separatist insurgency in Chechnya, a
predominantly Muslim republic, gained a religious tone in its war
against Russia. Violence and collective punishments by Russian forces
aggravated Muslims in the region, and boosted an Islamist insurgency.
100 Miles
Ukraine
RUSSIA
Krasnodar Krai
Kazakhstan
Caspian Sea
Baksan
Chechnya
Sochi
Kabardino-
Balkaria
Grozny
Makhachkala
Black Sea
Dagestan
GEORGIA
Muslim majority
Significant Muslim minority
“People
do not support them actively, but they do not resist,” Murat Khokonov, a
professor of physics at Kabardino-Balkaria State University, said of
the insurgent networks. “They don’t trust the security structures. They
don’t trust the police.”
The
insurgency has been driven so far underground that the reverberations
in society are usually felt only when militants battle police. On the
night of Jan. 11, in a small village near Baksan, Khizir Tlyepshev told
his wife that he was leaving for the public bathhouse shortly before
Russia’s security forces cordoned off the area, searching for four men
who had sprayed a police car with bullets. When officers came to their
house, they demanded to know the location of a bunker. “What bunker?”
his wife, Ramyeta, said she had told them.
Ten days later, officers in masks came a second time.
Inside
a chicken coop behind the house, where the Tlyepshevs’ four children
often played, the officers uncovered a shallow trench, and there, the
authorities said, they found four containers with more than 100 pounds
of explosives. Mrs. Tlyepsheva said she had no idea the trench was
there, how the explosives were put there or whether her husband could
have been involved.
Mr.
Tlyepshev, who has not returned or contacted his wife since that night,
worked as a builder. Like the majority of Muslims in southern Russia,
he showed no outward signs of embracing a radical strain of Islam, let
alone aiding the amorphous networks of fighters who do, his wife said.
She does not know whether he is in custody or in hiding, an accomplice
of Russia’s insurgency or a victim of its security forces. She does not
know if he is alive.
“I feel like I’m trapped between them,” Mrs. Tlyepsheva said.
On
the eve of Sochi, even the Olympics, portrayed by officials and state
news media as a unifying celebration of the country’s re-emergence on
the world stage, are regarded with ambivalence here. The monumental
relay of the Olympic flame, a staged event that went as far as the North
Pole and the International Space Station, was sharply curtailed in the
Caucasus, held inside well-guarded stadiums, including those in
Dagestan, in Chechnya and, last week, in Nalchik.
Many
of the ethnic groups in the Caucasus are related to the Circassians,
who consider Sochi part of their homeland, conquered by the Russians in
the 19th century after what activists today hope to publicize as an act
of genocide.
copy http://www.nytimes.com/
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