Trouble in the Caucasus

Thursday morning, local time, terrorists launched attacks in Nalchik, capital of the Caucasus Republic of Kabardino-Balkaria.

As the Washington Post reports:

Dozens of people were killed in street fighting in the southern Russian city of Nalchik Thursday morning after scores of gunmen launched a wave of attacks on government buildings, telecommunications facilities and the airport.

Pitched battles across the city subsided by the early afternoon, but police continued to hunt for suspected gunmen, officials said. Two of the attackers continued to hold an unknown number of hostages in a downtown building Thursday evening, officials said. Seven fighters continued to hold out in an Interior Ministry building, according to Vladimir Kolesnikov, a deputy state prosecutor.
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Local officials and Russian news agencies said 20 of the attackers were killed as well as 12 members of the security forces. At least 12 civilians also died, Russian news agencies reported. Another 88 people were wounded, according to local hospitals. Police said they had captured 12 insurgents.

Estimates of the number of attackers ranged from 60 to 300, the uncertainty a measure of the mayhem that descended on the city shortly after 9 a.m.

Nalchik has been a center of terrorist activity. It is not far from Chechnya, and Nalchik is only 60 miles or so from Beslan, the site of that awful terrorist attack on a school full of children which killed over 300 people.

Russian authorities have had a difficult time getting a handle on the violence in the Caucasus region. After Beslan, the population despaired that their government was strong enough to defeat the terrorists, and attacks like this only add to the despair.

This Heritage Foundation paper explains the roots of the violence in the Caucasus republics.

In 1850, the czar again ordered his Caucasus Viceroy, Prince Michael Vorontsov, to “firmly fol­low my system of destruction of dwellings and food supply, and bothering them with incur­sions.”[3] The Chechen reaction to the devastation of their settlements and the death of their women, children, and elderly was hardly surprising. According to Tolstoy, who described a village destroyed by the Russian army:

Nobody even discussed hatred toward the Russians. The feeling that all Chechens experienced, from a child to a grown up, was stronger than hatred. It was not hate, but the lack of recognition of these Russian dogs as human beings. It was such a revulsion, disgust and non-comprehension, facing the irrational cruelty of these creatures, that the desire to exterminate them was a natural feeling, as natural as the instinct of self-preservation. [This] was like the desire to exterminate vermin, poisonous spiders and wolves.[4]

The czarist government exiled over 500,000 Chechens, Circassians, and other Muslims to the Ottoman Empire, and they are now found through­out the Middle East, from Turkey to Israel and Jor­dan. During the Bolshevik regime, Chechens were first exploited in fighting the anti-communist Cos­sacks, then strafed by airplanes and poisoned with gas in the 1920s.

A full-fledged revolt erupted in the North Cauca­sus in the late 1930s, only to be brutally put down. In 1944, Stalin, Soviet Foreign Minister V. M. Molo­tov, and NKVD chief Lavrenti Beria presided over the forcible deportation of the Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, and others to Siberia and Central Asia, leading to an ethnic cleansing of millions. Chechens and others were allowed to return to their lands only in 1956 after Stalin’s death.

Today, there is a strong Wahhabi influence behind the Muslim terrorists.

Wahhabi fighters, with their global networks of financial support and training, would like nothing better than to have Basaev and Abu Havs as supreme military commanders of the North Cauca­sus—without Maskhadov’s meddling. Basaev already trains and equips terrorist units, which grew out of Wahhabi madrassa (religious school) networks in Daghestan, Ingushetia, and Kabar­dino–Balkaria. Heavy-handed Russian tactics do not seem to be effective in stemming the spread of radical Islamic ideology.

Here are a few past incidents in Nalchik:

Russian forces surround alleged militants - Feb 20, 2005
Security Forces And Militans Shoot It Out In Nalchik - January 28, 2005
Caucasus gunmen kill four in raid - December 14, 2004

This article from the Jamestown Foundation talks about Yarmuk, an insurgent group in Kabardino-Balkaria, a group behind some of the lingering violence in Nalchik and the region:

The ethnic Russian community is worried more than others. A Russian from Kabardino-Balkaria explained to Jamestown that there are two opinions about Yarmuk among Russians in the republic. Some believe that Yarmuk is just a myth, while others think that "Wahhabis" could really take power in the region. There are rumors circulating in the republic that the Yarmuk group consists of 200 fighters. Some people suggest that 200 insurgents would be more than sufficient to attack Nalchik or other strategic points in Kabardino-Balkaria.

Yarmuk's actual strength is unknown. Last year the group struck several times in the republic but without notable success. In December the rebels ambushed a car carrying the warden of the local prison camp. He was seriously wounded, but managed to survive. In October 2004, Yarmuk fighters tried to assassinate the head of the local police organized crime department. On August 20, a group of ten insurgents were lying in wait in a cornfield ready to ambush the motorcade of the local minister of internal affairs until they were discovered by a police patrol. The operation failed, but the group managed to elude the 200 policemen and Federal Security Service (FSB) spetsnaz troops that had surrounded them.

Security Watchtower has a good post on this latest attack, and one of the links there says Chechen rebels claim responsibility for the attack. The group claiming responsibility includes this Yarmuk group.

If there is good news here, it is from an article that Power Line links to. This article reports:

Russia’s most-wanted Chechen terrorist Shamil Basayev was killed by Russian forces in Thursday’s firefight in the Kabardino-Balkarian capital Nalchik, a source in the local branch of the FSB (the Federal Security Service) told the Chechen Society newspaper. Officials are remaining silent until a full identification procedure has been completed.

Basayev is believed to have been behind the attack in Beslan, and is a very bad man. It would be quite a good thing if his sorry carcass is now rotting.

I have a special interest in this because I know a couple of dear people in Nalchik. I hope and pray they are all right. In the past after attacks we get an email from them saying they are fine. I am looking for such an email again.

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Michelle Malkin wonders if anyone will notice this was done by Islamic terrorists.
Gateway Pundit has an excellent roundup. (via Michelle Malkin)
Captain Ed also highlights the Muslim nature of the attackers.