‘THE BLOOD will not just be spilled in our towns and villages. The war will come to their towns,” Doku Umarov promised recently. And yesterday’s bombings in Moscow had all the hallmarks of being the work of jihadists from the Caucasus Emirate group he leads. The role of suicide bombers and the rise in unrest in the North Caucasus region and in threats to extend the war to Moscow are indicative of the group’s involvement in an attack which may be a direct response to the deaths of some 20 of its militants in Chechnya.
Umarov had also claimed responsibility for a bomb that exploded on the Nevsky Express high-speed train in November, killing 27 people and injuring about 100.
The movement, spawned in the cauldron of Chechnya’s 20 years of bloody war, now campaigns across the region in Ingushetia, Dagestan and North Ossetia for a sharia law-based Islamic state or “emirate”. And just as the IRA once understood it got more political bang for its buck by targeting Britain, so Chechnya’s increasingly Islamicised and desperate rebels know they can bring more publicity to their cause by striking at the heart of Russia.
Moscow had announced last April that it was stepping down its Chechnya anti-terror operation leaving the battered republic, which is part of the Russian Federation, largely to the mercies of its youthful and brutal leader, Ramzan Kadyrov. Since then, however, attacks on federal personnel in Chechnya and neighbouring Dagestan and Ingushetia have intensified and President Dmitry Medvedev admitted in November that instability in the region remains Russia’s single biggest problem.
He responded in January by installing a powerful new envoy responsible for the North Caucasus, Alexander Khloponin, with instructions to concentrate on improving the economy in a region where corruption and unemployment are rife. That strategy is likely to have been eclipsed by the bombings which will serve to strengthen the hand of the more muscular Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin who returned to Moscow yesterday from a visit to Siberia promising that “the terrorists will be destroyed”.
Such attacks are almost impossible to defend against and although the Russian authorities are likely to crack down hard and indiscriminately against the entire North Caucasus community in Moscow, it is unlikely that they will be able to prevent further attacks if indeed they herald a wider campaign.
The bombers also understand that their actions, primarily designed to remind war-weary Russians of the unresolved conflict in their backyard, will play into the broader domestic policy agenda, undermining the economic and political “modernisation” programme championed, albeit half-heartedly, by Medvedev. The president has been compared to Alexander I, a man who talked reform but achieved little, and has to date polled only 10-11 per cent support for his agenda from a sceptical public. The authoritarian and demagogic tendencies of his prime minister are likely to be strengthened by a new climate of fear.