A14 From Page One
FIN. EST.
Minsk BEL.
RUSSIA
Kiev UKRAINE
CHECHNYA
Black Sea
Ankara
GEO. ARM.
TURKEY
SOURCE: Staff reports
Groznyy
AZER. IRAN
KAZAK.
Oct. 24, 2002
Chechen rebels storm a Moscow theater, taking more than 700 hostages. At least 130 hostages and nearly 40 Chechen militants are killed when Russian special forces take control.
Feb. 7, 2004
A bomb detonates outside a subway train in Moscow, killing more than 40 people and wounding more than 200. President Vladimir Putin blames Chechen rebels for the attack.
Aug. 25, 2004
Two passenger jets crash within minutes of each other after taking off in Moscow, killing at least 88 people. A week later, a female suicide bomber kills 10 people outside a metro station in Moscow.
September 2004
Hundreds die when guerrillas storm Beslan’s School No. 1 and hold more than 1,000 hostages. The 52-hour siege ends when Russian troops and the guerrillas battle. At least 334 people, mostly children, are killed.
Nov. 28 2009
A train derailment on the rail line between Moscow and St. Petersburg, kills 28 people. Rebel leader Doky Umarov claims responsibility.
GRAPHIC BY DWUAN JUNE, MAP BY GENE THORP/THE WASHINGTON POST
After bombings, fear of a return of terrorism
russia from A1
knowledged the obvious: The reb- els had not been defeated, and they appeared to be making good on threats to stage attacks again not just in their volatile home- land but also in the heart of Rus- sia.
“Blood will no longer be limited to our cities and towns. The war is coming to their cities,” the rebel leader, Doku Umarov, warned in a video interview posted on the Internet last month. “If Russians think the war only happens on television, somewhere far away in the Caucasus where it can’t reach them, then God willing, we plan to show them that the war will re- turn to their homes.” There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the deadly bombings, which also injured more than 70 people. But Alexan- der Bortnikov, director of the Fed- eral Security Service, or FSB, said preliminary evidence indicated that the attacks had been commit- ted by “terrorist groups linked to the North Caucasus region.” The first blast occurred shortly
before 8 a.m. as the doors were closing on a packed train at the Lubyanka station, located under the headquarters of the FSB, the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB. The location prompted speculation that the attack was intended as revenge, because the FSB has led the Kremlin’s some- times brutal efforts to crush the insurgency in Chechnya and the rest of the North Caucasus. A smaller explosion took place
at the Park Kultury station, four stops away on the same line. Offi- cials said evidence at the scenes, including body parts, indicated both bombers were women wear- ing belts packed with explosives as well as bolts and iron bars that acted as deadly shrapnel. The rebellion in the North Cau- casus began in the 1990s as a na- tionalist drive for Chechen inde- pendence. In recent years, it has been transformed into an Islam- ist insurgency that draws support from other ethnic groups and has spread beyond Chechnya, includ-
This insurgency is a concern because it is more difficult to negotiate with.
ing to neighboring Ingushetia and Dagestan. The Kremlin has repeatedly as-
serted it was close to wiping it out, and last spring, it declared an end to military operations in the region. But the militants have proven resilient, staging a string of assassinations, bombings and suicide attacks in the last year. Still, the government had large- ly succeeded in limiting the vio- lence to the North Caucasus since 2004, and many Russians had come to think of the turmoil there as an isolated problem irrelevant to their lives. In Moscow, resi- dents shed the fear that gripped them through the late 1990s and early 2000s, when militants staged multiple attacks in the city, including six on the subway sys- tem. Many Russians credited Putin, then the president, with ending the violence. He used the terrorist threat to roll back democratic re- forms and consolidate power, pushing through a law that elimi- nated the election of regional gov- ernors, for example. But Monday’s attack, which fol- lowed a bombing in November that caused a luxury train be- tween Moscow and St. Petersburg
on washingtonpost.com
View additional photos from Monday’s subway attacks in Moscow at washingtonpost.com/world
to derail, killing 28 people, pre- sents a direct challenge to that record at a time when Putin faces rising discontent over Russia’s worst recession in a decade. “He’s the loser because he promised several times to put an end to the insurgency, and he has failed,” said Alexei Malashenko, a political scholar at the Carnegie Moscow Center. Sergei Markedonov, a specialist on the Caucasus at the Institute for Political and Military Analy- sis, said the attacks may prompt a more serious public debate about how to deal with the rebellion. “Putin gained great popularity by demonstrating his readiness to crush terrorists, but I think after 10 years of brutal rhetoric and ac- tions, it’s time for a new under- standing,” he said. Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s handpicked successor as presi- dent, has promoted a more nu- anced approach to the North Cau- casus, arguing that the govern- ment needs to do more than kill militants and must address the root causes of the insurgency, in- cluding widespread poverty, ram- pant corruption and deep alien- ation from the Russian state. He and his appointees have reached out to opposition and other hos- tile groups in the region sympa- thetic to the militants. But in televised remarks after
laying flowers at the Lubyanka station Monday night, Medvedev adopted an stern tone. “They are beasts,” he said of the militants. “Whatever motives they were guided by, what they are doing is a crime by any law and any moral standard. I have no doubt that we will track them down and destroy them.” Putin cut off an official trip to Siberia to return to the capital. He also promised destruction, call- ing the bombings “a crime ter- rible in its consequences and dis- gusting in its manner.” Some officials suggested the at- tacks may have been in retalia- tion for the recent raids by securi- ty forces in the North Caucasus that left two key rebel figures dead: Alexander Tikhomirov, a charismatic preacher known for recruiting suicide bombers, and Anzor Astemirov, who is believed to have made the original propos- al to abandon the goal of Chechen independence in favor establish- ing what the rebels call the Cauca- sus Emirate. Umarov, a veteran Chechen
fighter, declared jihad and adopt- ed that cause in 2007 after Rus- sian forces killed many of his col- leagues in the leadership of the original Chechen separatist movement. “They’re not very numerous,
maybe 1,000 of them, but con- trary to the 1990s, they are well trained and can recruit desperate people to use as suicide bombers,” Sergei Arutyunov, a scholar of the Caucasus at the Russian Academy of Sciences, said of the rebels. “They feed on the desperation of the public, as well as a huge pool of dirty money from corruption, racketeering, drug trafficking and other sources.” Grigory Shvedov, editor of the Caucasian Knot, a Web site that reports on the region, said the new insurgency poses a serious threat because it is more difficult to negotiate with and is organized as a network, not a hierarchy. “By killing the separatist lead- ers, the security forces nearly de- stroyed the whole separatist agenda,” he said. “But this is something different. They’re not organized as an army where the general plays a central role. They’re religiously motivated warriors, and that’s a real dead end for negotiations.”
panp@washpost.com
St. Petersburg
Moscow
0 MILES 400
S
KLMNO
A timeline of insurgency
Monday’s subway attacks in Moscow raised fears that separatist rebellions in Russia’s Muslim republics might have transformed into a radical insurgency that has brought its fight to Russia. Here is a look at attacks in the past 10 years that Russian authorities have linked to Muslim insurgents.
TUESDAY, MARCH 30, 2010
SERGEY PONOMAREV/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Passengers on the Moscow subway are on edge as a train stops at the Lubyanka station after a suicide bomb had been detonated.
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