Four years ago, on October 13, 2005, a group of desperate and badly
prepared young Muslims in Kabardino-Balkaria launched simultaneous
attacks on police and security facilities in Nalchik, the republican
capital.
The
operation was a disaster: 95 young men were killed, of whom only 37
were actual fighters, according to the resistance website
kavkazcenter.com. "The Guardian" one week later quoted a witness to the
fighting who recalled hearing one of the young attackers holed up in
the security-service building yell to a comrade-in-arms, "How do you
reload a grenade launcher?"
The Nalchik attacks were planned by
members of the so-called Yarmuk jamaat, which had staged a series of
isolated attacks on police facilities across the republic over the
previous two years. Most of the young fighters were said to be devout
but hitherto law-abiding Muslims who had been apprehended by police and
security forces and subjected to torture, and who sought revenge on the
police for that brutality and humiliation.
In a recent
interview,
Arsen Kanokov, whom then-Russian President Vladimir Putin had named
Kabardino-Balkaria Republic president just weeks before the attacks,
termed that heavy-handed approach on the part of police and security
personnel "a mistake," and said that the situation has since improved
"slightly" thanks to efforts to engage young believers and warn them of
the dangers of radical Islam. But at the same time he admitted that
some police officials continue to "inflict damage."
In June
2008, Kanokov had warned the republic's parliament that "the number of
adherents of radical Islam is on the increase," and that a repeat of
the Nalchik attacks could not be ruled out. Boris Pashtov, who heads
the KBR Ministry for Information Communications, Public Organizations,
and Youth Affairs, similarly
admitted
in April 2009 that "the problem of Islamic radicalism in
Kabardino-Balkaria is still in a phase that requires heightened
attention." And a senior FSB official admitted in July that resistance
emissaries seek to recruit fighters among the republic's students.
The
Yarmuk jamaat that formed the nucleus of the Nalchik attackers has
since been subsumed into a larger fighting unit, the
Kabardino-Balkar-Karachai jamaat. But the incidence of insurgent
attacks in Kabardino-Balkaria remains far lower than in either
Ingushetia or Daghestan.
Apart from the shooting in
November 2007
of nine members of a hunting party whom they apparently mistakenly
identified as security personnel and the drive-by killing in
January 2008
in Nalchik of a senior Interior Ministry official and his driver,
resistance fighters have generally confined themselves to picking off
individual police officers on the outskirts of Nalchik.
According to KBR prosecutor Oleg Zharikov, there were 16
attacks
on police in 2007 and 36 in 2008. Thirty-six police and security
personnel were killed a further 29 injured last year; seven militants
were killed and 10 arrested. (By contrast, over 70 police and security
personnel were killed in Ingushetia in 2008 and 167 injured.)
Zharikov
added, however, that militants are constantly collecting and evaluating
information about individual police officers, establishing secret bases
and arms caches, and seeking to recruit more young supporters,
including though propaganda on the internet.
Since January
this year, police in Kabardino-Balkaria have launched a series of
counterterrorism operations, in February, April, late May, June, and
August, in which at least 18 militants were killed. The dead included
former Yarmuk veteran Musa Mukozhev, one of the organizers of the
Nalchik attacks; international sambo (a Russian form of self-defense)
champion Murat Ristov; and Adamey Djappuyev.
Valery Ustov, the
ranking prosecutor's office investigator for the KBR, described those
killings to RIA Novosti in August as having dealt "a serious blow" to
the resistance forces. He predicted that while the resistance may
continue to attract new recruits, the numbers will not be as great as
in the past.
http://www.rferl.org/content/Four_Years_After_Nalchik_How_Strong_Is_Resistance_In_KabardinoBalkaria/1850860.html
