The Russian Ordeal

(The author was in Moscow from September 1 to 3 and this article is based on his impressions there)

Russia and its people have been the victims of four terrorist strikes of the International Islamic Front (IIF)since August 24, 2004, resulting in the horrible deaths of about 450 innocent civilians, many of them youngchildren.

During these 10 days, more innocent civilians have been killed in Russia than since the beginning of thisyear in India’s Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) by the Pakistani jihadi organisations belonging to the IIF.More civilians have been killed by the jihadi terrorists in Russia in 10 days than since the beginning of thisyear in the rest of the world minus South Asia, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Of these four strikes, three were in Moscow and the fourth, directed at school children, their parents andteachers, took place at Beslan, a small town in North Ossetia. While the Moscow strikes were indiscriminateand did not make any distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims, the Beslan strike would appear to have beendirected at non-Muslim children.

The Moscow strikes were directed at means of transport and commuters, while the Beslan strike was intendedto use children as hostages in order to achieve certain demands of the terrorists. During the ensuingnegotiations between the terrorists and the local authorities to secure the release of the children, thingswent horribly wrong resulting in an exchange of fire between the security forces and the terrorists and thealleged use of explosives and mines by the terrorists, resulting in the death of 322 civilians, plus 20terrorists. Young children constituted a half of the civilians killed.

Of the three incidents in Moscow, two involved women suicide bombers, reportedly Chechens from Grozny, theChechen capital, and the third a man of unestablished identity, who seems to have activated the explosivedevice through remote control.

The first two incidents in Moscow--an explosion at a bus stop on the road to one of the local airports,which did not result in any fatal casualties, on August 24 and two other explosions on board two aircraft afew hours thereafter which led to the disintegration of the planes and the death of 90 persons, including allthe passengers and the members of the crew--- preceded the Presidential elections in Chechnya on August 29.Both the planes had taken off from a Moscow airport.

The third outside the entrance to a metro station on August 31, resulting in the death of 10 persons,coincided with the hearing by a local high court of an appeal filed on behalf of Zarema Muzhikhoyeva, aChechen woman terrorist arrested in July 2003 and sentenced to 20 years imprisonment on a charge of trying tocarry out a suicide mission.

The Russian authorities claim to have established that two Chechen women from Grozny named Amanat Nagayeva,30, and Satsita Dzhebirkhanova , 37, had a role in the explosions on board the two planes and a third womannamed Roza Nagayeva, who is said to be the sister of Amanat, had carried out the suicide bombing outside themetro station.

Frantic search was being made all over Moscow for two other suicide bombers, one of them named MaryamTaburova while the name of the other is not known, who had reportedly traveled together to Moscow from Groznyalong with the other three for carrying out suicide strikes. The authorities claim that the Chechen terroristshave trained eight other women suicide bombers, who may be available for similar missions in the coming days.

While the Russian authorities claim to have established that the disintegration of the two planes wascaused by an improvised explosive device (IED), they have not yet been able to establish how the device wassmuggled into the planes and activated.

Amongst the various theories reportedly under examination are:

· The devices, with a timer, were concealed in the checked-in baggage belonging to the two Chechenwomen, who were made to travel by the aircraft, with or without the knowledge that their baggage contained theexplosive devices. If after having successfully got the baggage checked in, the women had dropped out of theflights, this would have set off an alarm resulting in the off-loading and checking of their baggage.

The responsibility for the explosions on board the two planes and outside the metro station has beenclaimed by the Islambouli Brigades, headed by Mohammad Islambouli, younger brother of Lt.Khaled Islambouli,both of whom were involved in the assassination of President Anwar Sadat of Egypt in Cairo in 1981.

While Khaled Islambouli was arrested by the Egyptian authorities, tried and executed in 1982, MohammadIslambouli, along with Ayman al-Zawahiri, the No. 2 of Al Qaeda, and the late Mohammad Atef, the formeroperational chief of Al Qaeda, escaped to Afghanistan and joined the Arab mercenary force, which was trainedby the USA’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and usedagainst the Soviet troops in Afghanistan.

After the withdrawal of the Soviet troops from Afghanistan in 1988, Mohammad Islambouli and his followersstayed behind in Afghanistan and carried out a terrorist strike against the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad in1996. They started co-operating with Osama bin Laden after he shifted to Afghanistan in 1996 and theIslambouli Brigade, along with two other jihadi terrorist organizations of Egypt joined his IIF, when it wasformed in February,1998. Initially, it consisted of only Egyptians and other Arabs, but after the US airstrikes in Afghanistan post-9/11, it started recruiting Chechens, Uzbeks, Uighurs and Pakistani jihadis too.It is not clear why it generally refers to itself in plural as "the Islambouli Brigades" and not insingular.

Since October 7, 2001, it has been operating from the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) ofPakistan. It had also claimed responsibility for the unsuccessful attempt to kill Shaukat Aziz, the newPakistani Prime Minister, in the last week of July, 2004, at Fateh Jung in Pakistani Punjab.

No organization has so far claimed responsibility for the carnage in Beslan. While the Russian authoritieshave claimed to have killed nine Arabs involved in the carnage, the indications till now are that it wascarried out by a recently-formed organization called the North Caucassus Islamic Front (NCIF), which isreportedly a united front of the jihadi organizations of Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia and has as itsobjective the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate in the region. It is patterned after the Pakistan-basedIIF and the Jemaah Islamiyah of South-East Asia.

It is reported that amongst its founding members are a Chechen organization called the Salakhin RiadusShakhidi headed by Shamil Basayev, an organization of Ingushetia (name not known) headed by Magomed Yevloyev,another Chechen organization (name not known) headed by Doku Umarov and an unidentified organization ofDagestan.

It is reported that since its formation early this year, the NCIF has been closely collaborating with theIIF, but it is not known whether it has formally joined the IIF.

The series of terrorist strikes since August 24, have caused fears of a possible act of catastrophicterrorism by these ruthless elements. The Moscow Times of September 2,2004, reported as follows:

"Given that a series of deadly attacks, including co-ordinated raids in Ingushetia in June and a stringof suicide bombings in Moscow, have failed to affect the Kremlin line, the extremists might opt for attacks ofcatastrophic proportions in the hope that the greater casualties and psychological shock would cause acapitulation.

" In a clear recognition of this threat, the Federal Nuclear Power Agency announced Wednesday (September1) that security has been boosted at nuclear power plants and other nuclear facilities across Russia.

" During Russia’s first military campaign in Chechnya in 1994-96, the Chechen rebels acquiredradioactive materials, threatened to attack nuclear facilities, plotted to hijack a nuclear submarine, andattempted to put pressure on the Russian leadership by planting a container with radioactive materials inMoscow and threatening to detonate it.

."Russia’s second campaign, which began in the fall of 1999, has already seen Chechen-based radicalseparatists plant explosives in tanks filled with chemical substances, scout nuclear facilities and establishcontacts with an insider at a nuclear power plant."

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B. Raman is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently,Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Distinguished Fellow and Convenor, Observer ResearchFoundation (ORF), Chennai Chapter.