From: MSN Nicknamepsychoteddybear24  (Original Message)    Sent: 9/20/2007 2:36 PM
Chechnya Weekly - Volume VIII, Issue 36
September 20, 2007

IN THIS ISSUE:
* Ingush Police Battle Protesters in Nazran…
* …As Gunmen Attack Police and FSB Officers
* Rappani Khalilov Reportedly Killed
* Memorial: Kidnappings in Chechnya Way Down
* Briefs
* Chechnya's Rebel Brigadier Generals
By Andrei Smirnov
* Understanding the Motivations behind the Dagestani Rebels
By Andrei Smirnov
* Doku Umarov’s Attempts to Rebuild His Foundations
By Mairbek Vatchagaev
* The Truth about the “Kataib al-Khoul” Ossetian Jamaat
By Mairbek Vatchagaev
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Ingush Police Battle Protesters in Nazran…

On September 19, security forces in Nazran, Ingushetia, clashed with demonstrators protesting the kidnapping of two brothers, reportedly by Federal Security Service (FSB) personnel.

Usam Baisaev of the Memorial Human Right Center office in Nazran told Ekho Moskvy radio that the protestors were inhabitants of the village of Surkhakhi, two of whose residents, Marooned Osmanovich Aushev and Magomed Makharipovich Aushev, were abducted from the Chechen capital Grozny on September 18 and taken to Ingushetia. The protesters from Surkhakhi were joined by the relatives of other “disappeared” people: according to human rights groups, around 158 people have been abducted in the republic since 2002. Baisaev told Ekho Moskvy that according to the relatives of the Aushev brothers, the two were kidnapped by Federal Security Service (FSB) personnel. The brothers had arrived in Grozny from Astrakhan, where one of them had sought medical treatment and the other had submitted an application for a higher learning institute. They were in a taxi leaving the Chechen capital when they were kidnapped, Baisaev said. The Chechen Interior Ministry, meanwhile, said that none of the republic’s power structures was involved in the abduction.

Newsru.com reported on September 19 that police attempted to break up the protest in Nazran but were met by stones hurled by the protesters, which injured several police, one of whom was hospitalized. RIA Novosti reported that the police then fired in the air, but the Regnum news agency reported that security forces in armored personnel carriers fired machineguns toward the crowd. The independent Ingushetiya.ru website reported that two protesters were wounded by the gunfire while Interfax quoted an anonymous law-enforcement source as saying the wounded protesters had not been hit by gunfire, but were taken to the hospital with minor injuries and bruises and then released. A deputy in Ingushetia’s parliament, Magomet Aushev, said that four people were wounded during the confrontation between the protesters and police and were in serious condition in the hospital. Aushev said the violence occurred when members of Ingushetia’s GAI traffic police along with several dozen members of the republic’s OMON special police unit arrived at the scene of the protest and demanded that the protesters disburse. The OMON then began to beat one protester with a truncheon, to which protesters responded with rock-throwing, after which the police began shooting over the protesters’ heads, Aushev said. The protesters lay down on the ground to avoid the gunfire, after which they responded again with rock-throwing, the Regnum news agency reported. Masked security forces then beat protesters with rifle butts, Newsru.com reported. The website quoted police as saying that Ingush President Murat Zyazikov had given the order to break up the protest. Zyazikov recently told Novye izvestia that he would not permit protest rallies in the republic (Chechnya Weekly, September 13).

The head of the Ingush human rights group Mashr, Magomed Musolgov, told Ekho Moskvy that more than 1,000 people participated in the protest and that nine members of the republican parliament’s commission for investigating human rights violations, as well as the republic’s Interior Minister, Musa Medov, had gone to speak to the protesters. Newsru.com reported that some of the protesters, mainly women, had tried to beat Medov, forcing him to leave the area.

Regnum reported on September 20 that the two abducted Aushev brothers had been freed and described their ordeal, reporting that their abductors had placed sacks over their heads and beaten them. The kidnappers spoke Russian and a language of “one of the peoples of the North Caucasus,” the brothers said, and forced them into a pit with rats. The brothers said they were later “dumped” in an unknown place, after which they made their way to Nazran. Newsru.com reported on September 20 that the protest in Nazran was continuing and that the Aushev brothers were expected to join it.

Ingushetiya.ru reported on September 19 that members of Ingushetia’s parliament had sent a letter addressed to President Vladimir Putin, Prosecutor General Yury Chaika, Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliev and FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev, stating that the situation in the republic had sharply deteriorated following the abduction of the Aushev brothers and demanding that urgent measures be taken to find abducted people, ensure the observance of human rights guaranteed by the Russian constitution and stop extra-judicial killings and abductions. The republican legislators said that dozens of civilians had been abducted and killed without trials or investigations in Ingushetia during the past several years and that no proper investigations into such cases are being carried out. “Such deeds by the law-enforcement agencies discredit the federal authorities and cause fear and despair in society,” the letter stated, adding that the situation in Ingushetia could have unpredictable consequences and undermine efforts to stabilize the situation in the North Caucasus.

…As Gunmen Attack Police and FSB Officers

The violence at the protest in Nazran on September 19 took place against the backdrop of continued insurgent attacks on law-enforcement personnel in Ingushetia. Unidentified attackers shot up a UAZ vehicle carrying policemen in central Nazran on September 19, Interfax reported. According to the news agency, four policemen from Rostov Oblast who were stationed in Ingushetia were injured in the attack, two of whom later died in the hospital. The two murdered policemen were identified as Sergei Frolikov and Sergei Moshenko.

On September 18, unknown gunmen shot and killed Major Adrokhman Neiriev, the acting head of the criminal investigation department of the police in Ingushetia’s Sunzha district, in the village of Ordzhonikidzevskaya as he was leaving a mosque following evening prayers. Reuters on September 19 quoted police as saying that the gunmen escaped in a car that was later found abandoned with a sub-machinegun left inside. According to Russian news agencies, Neiriev took over as acting head of the Sunzha district police’s criminal investigation department from his boss Isa Merzhoev, who was shot and seriously wounded by unknown gunmen in the village of Troitskaya on August 13 (Chechnya Weekly, August 16).

On September 17, unidentified gunmen opened fire on Alikhan Kalimatov, an FSB lieutenant colonel, and his friend Beslan Ozdoev, outside the “Vainakh” café on the Caucasus federal highway in Ingushetia’s Nazran district. Kalimatov died at the scene while Ozdoev was rushed to a local hospital in critical condition, Russian news agencies reported. Interfax quoted a source in Ingushetia’s Interior Ministry as saying that Kalimatov was a brother of the former prosecutor of Ingushetia, Mukhmud-Ali Kalimatov, and had been sent to Ingushetia and North Ossetia to investigate the abductions of ethnic Ingush in North Ossetia.

RIA Novosti reported on September 15 that unknown persons set fire to the apartment of an ethnic Russian family in the city of Malgobek. No one was at home at the time of the incident and thus no one was hurt. On September 14, unidentified attackers fired 3-4 shots from a grenade launcher at a police checkpoint in Nazran’s Nasyr-Kortovsky municipal district on Kavkaz federal highway. The grenades missed their target but fell in the yards of several homes, slightly injuring two children and several adults.

Also on September 14, a powerful explosive device detonated on a road connecting the villages of Yandare and Surkhakhi in Ingushetia's Nazran district, Interfax reported. No one was hurt in the blast. A source in Ingushetia’s Interior Ministry told Interfax that the bomb exploded near a vehicle carrying Interior Ministry Internal Troops. In a separate incident on September 14, unidentified persons attacked a police station in Nazran with grenade launchers and small arms, Interfax reported.

Rappani Khalilov Reportedly Killed

Russian news agencies reported on September 18, that Rappani Khalilov, aka “Rabbani,” the commander of the North Caucasus insurgency’s “Dagestani Front,” was killed in a special operation in village of Novy Sulak, on the outskirts of the Dagestani city of Kizilyurt. Kommersant reported on September 19 that Russian security forces managed to kill Khalilov and his right hand man, Nabi Nabiev, only after a ten-hour battle in which the federal side employed tanks and armored personnel carriers and ended up leveling the house in which the two militants were holed up.

According to the newspaper, units of the federal Interior Ministry and Federal Security Service (FSB) launched the operation early in the morning of September 17. The night before, Russian security forces, having received confirmation of Khalilov’s location from two captured rebel messengers, had evacuated the residents of several houses neighboring the one in which he was hiding. The spetsnaz who surrounded the apartment building urged the rebels to surrender, but received automatic weapons-fire in response. A shootout ensued but died down around 10 a.m., with the apartment building on fire from Shmel flamethrowers and officials declaring the operation largely over. However, when the commandos moved closer to the building, they were fired on once again, this time from a basement room. The commanders of the operation called in reinforcements, after which members of FSB’s Vympel special forces unit and the Russian Army’s 136th Motorized Brigade arrived at the scene, the latter having driven from their base in Buinaksk in three infantry fighting vehicles (BMPs), four armored personnel carriers and a tank.

“Fire from cannon and large-caliber machineguns, and the treads of the tank, practically razed the house to the ground and by 16:30 there was already no one left to fire back from it,” Kommersant wrote. “As was discovered during an examination of the [ruins of the house], just two militants had held off armor and armed-to-the-teeth spetsnaz for ten hours – a well-fortified and deep concrete basement had helped them withstand the attack.” According to the newspaper, investigators who began to examine the ruins of the house first found “a disfigured body with a severed head and upper extremities” which they nonetheless managed to identify as the remains of Nabi Nabiev. Khalilov’s body was then unearthed and positively identified by both the captured messengers and the landlady of the home. The head of the FSB’s department for Dagestan, Vyacheslav Shanshin, who was in charge of the operation, said associates of Khalilov positively identified him with 100-percent certainty. The body was also matched with photographs showing a scar on Khalilov’s hip that he sustained during a shootout in 2003 with members of then Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov’s security service – when, as Kommersant noted, Khalilov was also declared dead. Shanshin said DNA testing would be used to confirm Khalilov’s death. According to Kommersant, however, Russian siloviki are this time certain he was killed in the operation.

Rappani Khalilov, an ethnic Lak who served as a Soviet border guard along the border with Mongolia, became an adherent of militant Islam, or “Wahabbism,” in 1998 and the following year participated in the raid of Chechen militants into Dagestan. After that raid was suppressed, he went to Chechnya, where he created a unit numbering up to 100 men. According to Kommersant, Khalilov organized several dozen terrorist attacks in Dagestan, the most infamous being the bombing of a Victory Day parade in the city Kaspiisk on May 9, 2002, which killed 45 people. Following the death of Shamil Basaev in July 2006, Khalilov was named a possible “successor” to the dead rebel military commander. In September 2006, rebel leader Dokka Umarov named Khalilov commander of the rebel “Dagestani Front.”

An item posted on the separatist Daymohk website on September 19 stated that while there had false reports of Rappani Khalilov’s death in the past, this time it appeared to be true. “This is how all of our Dagestani brothers are killed,” the item read. “I will never cease to be amazed by them. Dagestan has not realized the value of its brave sons.”