Violence has claimed the lives of another four Russian policemen in the southern part of that country.
In the latest incident, an explosion following an intense gun battle between policemen and militant fighters killed at least seven people, including four police officers, in Ingushetia, a violence-plagued southern Russian republic close to Chechnya.
The fighting began Thursday morning when militants holed up in a private home opened fire on police officers who were checking passports in a residential section of Nazran, the capital of Ingushetia, a spokesman for the local branch of the Federal Security Service said.
The attack was one of the most deadly in Ingushetia, a small and impoverished Muslim republic which shares a border with Chechnya.
Islamists based in Chechnya have been responsible for waves of violent Jihadi attacks in Russia spanning at least a decade. One of the most striking characteristics of militant Islamism terrorism in Russia is the large involvement of foreign Jihadists in the conflict.
For example, a group called the The Islambouli Brigades, claimed responsibility for the February 2004 Moscow metro bombing which killed forty people. The Islambouli Brigades, an Al Qaeda-associated group previously known for attacks in Pakistan, also took the credit for a Russian Airplane bombing the same year.
The Brigades is named for Egyptian army lieutenant Khaled al-Islambouli, the main author of the assassination of President Anwar Sadat, murdered for seeking an accord with Israel.
Islambouli, whose brother Mohammed is an Al Qaeda operative, was a member of the Egyptian Islamic Group, led by Ayman al Zawahiri, now Bin Laden’s second in command.
The link between Chechen rebels and international terrorism, including al Qaeda, is not new. Ever since the first Chechen war (1992-96), Islamists from all over the Middle East and beyond have gone to Chechnya to fight the Russian infidel.
Warlords, most prominently Shamil Basayev, have been attracted to Wahhabism — and by Saudi and other Gulf money, weapons, and volunteers.
It was one of those volunteers, Saudi-born Bin Saleh al-Suwailem, who, together with Basayev, invaded the Russian province of Daghestan in 1999, provoking the second Chechen war. Basayev fought for Chechen independence for more than a decade.
On July 10, 2006, Basayev was killed in an explosion in Ingushetia. Four months later, Russian security forces killed Abu Hafs al-Urdani, the Jordanian-born commander of foreign fighters in Chechnya.
A number of Muslims living in France and the UK have also joined the Chechens, while the self-proclaimed Chechen Islamic Republic was only recognized by the Taliban.
The most notorious Islamist attacks in Russia include:
– September 2004. Basayev ordered an attack on a school in Beslan, a town in North Ossetia. More than three hundred people died in the three-day siege, most of them children.
– August and September 1999. Bombing of a shopping arcade and an apartment building in Moscow that killed sixty-four people.
– September 1999. Two bombings in the Russian republic of Dagestan and southern Russian city of Volgodonsk.
– May 2002: Bombing of a military parade in the south western town of Kaspiisk which killed forty-one people, including seventeen children.
– October 2002. The seizure of Moscow’s Dubrovka Theatre, where approximately seven hundred people were attending a performance. Russian Special Forces launched a rescue operation, but the opium-derived gas they used to disable the hostage-takers killed more than 120 hostages, as well as many of the terrorists. Basayev took responsibility for organising the attack.
– December 2002. A dual suicide bombing that attacked the headquarters of Chechnya’s Russian-backed government in Grozny. International Islamist terrorists helped local Chechens mount the assault, which killed eighty-three people.
– June 2004. A three-day long attack on Ingushetia in June 2004, which killed almost one hundred people and injured another 120.
– October 2005. Street fighting in the south Russian city of Nalchik when Chechen rebels assaulted government buildings, telecommunications facilities, and the airport. At least eighty-five people killed.
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