War in the North Caucasus. Not so small any more

Could the war in Chechnya be turning into a war outside it?

WHILE the Russian army practised in the east, showing its ability to respond to threats it no longer faces, Chechen rebels in the south demonstrated its inability to deal with threats that are its daily fare. In the biggest attack outside Chechnya since the 1999 incursion into Dagestan, which provoked Russia's second war in Chechnya, over 200 men attacked targets in Ingushetia, among them the interior ministry in Nazran. The raid left almost 100 dead, among them senior Ingush officials and a UN worker. The attacks came a few weeks after a bomb in Grozny had killed Chechnya's Kremlin-imposed president, Akhmad Kadyrov.

As usual, Russia blamed Aslan Maskhadov, Chechen rebel leader and one-time elected president. His aide, Akhmed Zakayev, in exile in London, denied it; but Mr Maskhadov had told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that the rebels were changing tactics from “acts of sabotage” to “launching big attacks”. The day before the attack, Mr Zakayev confirmed to Kommersant, a newspaper, that such a decision had been adopted by field commanders on June 14th - among them Shamil Basayev, who had led the Dagestan raid. Russia's interior minister, Boris Gryzlov, said that the attack was “a consequence of the work of the law-enforcement agencies”, a last shout by rebels of whom many “have already been eliminated”. But the scale of the attacks suggests the opposite.

Ingushetia is where many Chechens fled from the war. Tens of thousands were put up in camps run by foreign donors. Last year, to support its claim that Chechnya was normalising, the government began closing the camps and sending refugees “home”, often under threat of violence or prosecution. According to a report from Human Rights Watch, “human- rights abuses which previously occurred almost exclusively in Chechnya are increasingly spreading across the border”, among them killings and kidnappings by Russian and Chechen security forces.

All this, says Thomas de Waal, of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in London, could have led to “home-grown seed-beds of militancy in Ingushetia, perhaps just a few miles down the road from Nazran”. A hint came from reports that some raiders spoke Ingush, not Chechen, and that the man the authorities claim led the raid is an Ingush. That the attackers seemed to come from several directions, including from South Ossetia, shows that, even if the usual escape route to Georgia is closing, the guerrillas can still move with ease inside Russia.

This week Russia's upper house of parliament was due to approve a law giving operational control of the army to the defence minister, leaving the generals in charge of strategy. This could help President Vladimir Putin's attempts to reform the army, and might be a step towards reducing the corruption that helps keep the Chechnya conflict going. But he has now sent more troops to Ingushetia as well.

Could the war inside Chechnya be turning into a war outside it?

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