Chechen Rebel Says He Planned Attacks/V

Chechen Rebel Says He Planned Attacks
By ELLEN BARRY
Copyright by Associated Press
March 31, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/world/europe/01dagestan.html?th&emc=th


MOSCOW — A former Chechen separatist who reinvented himself as a proponent of global jihad stepped out of the shadows on Wednesday to take responsibility for two suicide bombings on Moscow’s subway, and to offer himself as the face of an increasingly lethal pan-Caucasus insurgency.

The separatist, Doku Umarov, last year revived a suicide battalion believed to be behind some of the most notorious attacks of the past decade, and then issued a warning in February that he was planning attacks in central Russia. In the recording released Wednesday, Mr. Umarov seemed to take pleasure in thrusting the bloody violence of the Caucasus upon the comfortable residents of the capital. “You Russians hear about the war on television and the radio,” Mr. Umarov said on the video, apparently made hours after the subway blasts. “I promise you the war will come to your streets, and you will feel it in your own lives and on your own skin.”

In assuming a public role and taunting Russia with his pronouncements, Mr. Umarov seemingly played into the hands of Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, offering evidence that the threat in the Caucasian republics was part of a broader Islamic insurgency that threatened Russia’s security. That may provide Mr. Putin with a fresh rationale to pursue a take-no-prisoners policy in the Caucasus.

But the insurgents lacked a central figurehead, a role that Mr. Umarov now seems determined to seize for himself.

Grigory Shvedov, the editor of the Web-based news service Caucasian Knot, said Mr. Umarov, 45, had long been influential as a guerrilla fighter but has traditionally depended on younger, more charismatic protégés to communicate with the public.

“I don’t think he is going to be as popular as bin Laden, but he is definitely raising his profile,” Mr. Shvedov said. Mr. Umarov’s statement came to light as another double bombing killed at least 12 people in Dagestan. Suicide bombing was nearly unheard of in the region until 2000 and subsided for years before returning in 2009. The first bomb on Wednesday, in the town of Kizlyar, exploded in a parked car, killing two police officers who had pulled up in their vehicle. As rescue workers and police officials gathered, a man wearing a police uniform walked into the crowd and detonated explosives strapped to his body. The city’s police chief was killed and two dozen people were wounded.

President Dmitri A. Medvedev said the bombings on Monday and Wednesday were “links of the same chain.”

“All this is the manifestation of the same terrorist activity which has recently started to resurface in the Caucasus,” he said.

In his four-minute video, Mr. Umarov railed against the federal antiterrorist operations that have become a central element of Moscow’s strategy in the region. He said he had planned Monday’s bombings as revenge for a recent operation that killed civilians near the border between Chechnya and Ingushetia.

“On the 11th of February, 2010, officers of the criminal formation known as the F.S.B. carried out an operation to destroy peaceful citizens,” he said. “Any person who will condemn me for those operations, or who will accuse me of terrorism, I am laughing at those people. I can only grin, because I haven’t heard that Putin was accused of terrorism for the murder of civilians who were killed at his order.” The F.S.B. is Russia’s security service.

Mr. Umarov’s career has tracked the southern Russian rebellion, which was once powerful enough to force the Russian Army from Grozny. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he left a career as a construction engineer to fight with Chechen separatists. In 1997, when Russian troops had withdrawn from Grozny, he was appointed the head of the fledging government’s Security Council. But within 10 years, Russia had crushed the separatist movement and killed its most charismatic leaders. In the process, human rights groups say, its brutal tactics alienated the population.

“The nationalists became despondent,” said Mark Galeotti, a specialist in Russian security issues who leads New York University’s Center for Global Affairs. “They realized that if they were going to keep fighting, they needed a bigger cause, something more grand, more heroic, so that they felt history would be on their side.”

In 2007, Mr. Umarov announced an ideological sea change, declaring himself the emir of the Caucasus Emirate, which aimed to establish a Shariah-based state independent of Russia. With him came many of the former separatist fighters.

Last April, Mr. Umarov took another decisive step by announcing the revival of Riyadus-Salikhin, or the “Garden of Martyrs,” a suicide formation once led by Shamil Basayev that had lain dormant for five years. The battalion took responsibility for a 2002 hostage-taking at a Moscow theater. Since May, 17 suicide bombings have been recorded, all but one in the Northern Caucasus, Mr. Shvedov said.

Mr. Umarov is a rough-hewn fighter who speaks accented Russian, and for outreach he seemed to rely heavily on his protégé Aleksandr Tikhomirov, a young convert whose videos promoting suicide operations have been widely disseminated.

But Mr. Tikhomirov was killed a month ago during a federal raid on the Ingush village of Ekazhevo. His death was followed, three weeks later, by the killing of another close associate, Anzor Astemirov. Both deaths seemed to force Mr. Umarov to adopt a more public role.

Some experts argue that the militant underground in the Caucasus has become so dispersed in recent years that neither Mr. Umarov nor anyone else could emerge as its leader. Sergei A. Arutyunov, a Caucasus expert at the Russian Academy of Sciences, called Mr. Umarov “yesterday’s man.” Mr. Galeotti said Mr. Umarov had “very, very little power” in a movement made up of widely dispersed warlords.

“These Moscow attacks are significant precisely because they assert the notion that people should pay attention to him,” he said. “He needs spectaculars. What this will do is feed him a little more oxygen. It keeps him in play a while longer.”

Certainly, both officials and journalists have trained their attention on Mr. Umarov’s organization in recent days. A source in the General Prosecutor’s Investigative Committee told the newspaper Kommersant that Mr. Tikhomirov had recruited 30 potential suicide bombers, who were sent for training at a madrasa in Turkey and then returned to Mr. Tikhomirov’s authority. The investigator said according to his data, nine of those women had already carried out attacks.

Federal officials made no response to Mr. Umarov’s announcement on Wednesday night, but Ziyad Sabsabi, who represents Chechnya in Russia’s upper house of Parliament, said he believed the fighter would not live long. “It doesn’t matter that he has claimed responsibility for these bestial murders,” Mr. Sabsabi said. “In any case his days are numbered. He will be found, and so will his entourage.”

Michael Schwirtz contributed reporting from Moscow.






Russia Says Suicide Bomber Was Militant’s Widow
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY and ELLEN BARRY
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 2, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/world/europe/03moscow.html?hpw


MOSCOW — Baby-faced, she looks barely a teenager. But the pistol she is holding in the photograph suggests the violent destiny that she would choose: blowing herself up in a subway station in Moscow during the morning rush on Monday.

And posing with his arm around this 17-year-old woman is the man who would put her on this path, a 30-year-old militant leader who lured her from her single mother, drew her into fundamentalist Islam and married her. He was killed by federal forces in December, driving her to seek revenge.

On Friday, as the photograph circulated widely, the couple turned into an unsettling symbol of Islamic militancy in Russia — deeply repugnant to most people but also likely to be embraced by other extremists as a propaganda coup, a kind of Bonnie and Clyde of the insurgency.

The story of the woman, Dzhanet Abdullayeva, from Dagestan, a volatile, predominantly Muslim region of southern Russia, near Chechnya, speaks to the challenges facing the Kremlin as it vows to stamp out the armed underground. Harsher measures can backfire, further radicalizing a population alienated by endemic poverty and corruption. And men are not the only threat.

“These religious ideas are very attractive, because they give a kind of alternative to the world that exists,” said Zaur Gaziyev, editor in chief of Svobodnaya Respublika, an independent newspaper in Dagestan. “And so this young girl, who grew up without a father, who didn’t know male power, suddenly she meets a strong, brutal man, who gives her the sense of support.”

“She is herself a child,” Mr. Gaziyev said. “I don’t think she even understood what she was doing.”

In the photograph, Ms. Abdullayeva and her husband, Umalat Magomedov, are both brandishing weapons. In a separate photograph, she is holding a grenade. Her head is covered by a black Islamic scarf.

Ms. Abdullayeva — whose first name means “paradise” in her local Dagestani language — was one of two female suicide bombers who attacked the Moscow subway system, killing 40 people and wounding scores, the authorities confirmed Friday.

She is a striking example of the phenomenon of the so-called Black Widows — young women from the Caucasus who are deployed as human bombs and sent off to kill civilians in Russian cities, often after their husbands are killed by security forces.

Especially active in the early part of the last decade, they have carried out at least 16 bombings, including two aboard planes.

An official at the Interior Ministry of Dagestan said that it was not difficult for militant groups to recruit teenage women in a region with more women than men.

“The girls say, ‘Here is how you will live, and a man will always be beside you,’ ” the official said. “There is some romance about a man with a gun, with an automatic weapon. They make the fighters into heroes, naturally. These girls aren’t thinking straight.”

Ms. Abdullayeva apparently met Mr. Magomedov through the Internet.

This happens with increasing frequency, as young women strike up Internet relationships with older men who persuade them to accept fundamentalist Islam and, out of naïveté and romantic impulse, to abandon their families, said Ragimat Adamova, news editor for Novoye Delo, a newspaper in Dagestan.

Ms. Adamova says that once women are brought into the militant structure, they typically never leave. If a woman’s husband is killed, she typically marries a second, third or even a fourth fighter.

“Crudely speaking, these women are passed along like trophies,” she said. “They do not let their girls go.”

A local official in a Kostek, a Dagestani village, said that Ms. Abdullayeva was raised there by her mother, who traded goods at a local market. Though the family left for a larger city several years ago, teachers in the village remember Ms. Abdullayeva as a promising student who recited poetry in local competitions, said the official, Aida Aliyeva.

“People are in shock here; they say it couldn’t be true,” Ms. Aliyeva said. “We are honest workers here. We think that the city must have had some influence on her, because we don’t have anything like that here.”

Ms. Abdullayeva’s husband was said to have been appointed a commander last spring by Doku Umarov, a former Chechen separatist who is now a proponent of global jihad and who took responsibility for organizing the subway attacks.

On Dec. 31, federal forces stopped Mr. Magomedov’s car on a highway and killed him in a firefight. Ms. Abdullayeva then apparently made her decision.

Over the weekend, she and a second bomber, who has not been identified, took a private bus generally used by traders to Moscow from Dagestan, arriving in the city at 2 a.m. Monday, investigators said. The bus driver, who identified the two women from photographs, recalled that they were accompanied by a stocky man.

The police said they had identified an apartment rented by the women’s accomplices, where they say they believe the explosives were assembled. The accomplices met the women in a subway station and gave them belts fitted with explosives, an official told the Interfax news service.

“One of the men left with the first woman, and the other with the second,” the official said. “It is these two men who set off the bombs using a remote control.”

Ms. Abdullayeva’s life ended at 8:40 a.m. Monday at the Park Kultury subway station. Riding in a train, Sim Eih Xing, a medical student from Malaysia, said he noticed a strange-looking woman near the door “in a very abnormal posture.”

“She wasn’t wearing a scarf,” he told The Moscow Times. “Her eyes were very open, like on drugs, and she barely blinked, and it was scary. But I didn’t think she was a suicide bomber. I thought that she might be just mentally ill. So I stood behind her.”

He got off at Park Kultury and was a few feet away from the woman when the bomb detonated. Sparks appeared before his eyes and the station went silent. When he came to, he saw bodies in piles on the floor of the train. One of them was Ms. Abdullayeva’s.