A band of heavily armed Chechen guerrillas reportedly stormed a village in the neighboring Russian province of Dagestan on Monday, killing nine Russian border guards and taking four hostages.
Though the offensive involved a relatively small group of up to 60 rebels, it carried special significance among Dagestani officials, who believe the gunmen were Chechens. Chechen rebel incursions into Dagestan in 1999 sparked Russia’s second war to quell the separatist movement in Chechnya.
In Monday’s morning raid, gunmen apparently crossed into Dagestan from either Chechnya or Georgia and made their way through densely wooded highlands before clashing with a Russian border guard unit outside the village of Shauri.
The gunmen killed nine guards, commandeered a truck belonging to the unit, and drove to Shauri, where they seized a village hospital, said Basir Magomedov, chief of the village’s administrative district. Two of the hostages were medical staffers; the other two were an unemployed villager and a student.
“Obviously, this doesn’t represent the scale of what happened here in 1999,” Magomedov said, “but it appears they were using this raid . . . to gather intelligence about where Russian forces were concentrated.”
Dagestani police and Russian helicopters were unable to track down the gunmen, who appeared to be headed toward the Georgian border, Magomedov said. While Dagestani officials said they believed the gunmen were Chechen separatist guerrillas, a Web site linked to Chechen separatist warlord Shamil Basayev claimed that Dagestanis, who are fighting alongside Chechen guerrillas, staged Monday’s incursion.
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Russian leaders say Basayev led the raids on Dagestani villages in 1999.
Basayev also is believed to be the mastermind behind a wave of terrorist attacks in southern Russia and Moscow, including the October 2002 takeover of a theater in the Russian capital that resulted in the deaths of 129 hostages. Many of the attacks have involved suicide bombings, often carried out by Chechen women whose husbands or brothers were killed in the separatist conflict.
Last week a suicide bomber killed herself and five others outside Moscow’s landmark National Hotel, just a few hundred feet from the Kremlin and Russian parliament.
Russian authorities said they believe the woman had planned to target the building housing the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, but inadvertently detonated the explosives outside the hotel.
Separatists in Chechnya have been fighting to break off their mountainous Islamic republic from the rest of Russia for much of the last decade. The Kremlin’s plan for peace in the province involves keeping it within the fold of Russia but granting Chechens wider autonomy.
A referendum last spring to establish a constitution and the October election of Kremlin ally Akhmad Kadyrov as president were criticized by many observers as being rigged.