[For the first time in history, the Olympics are being held on the edge of a war zone. The conflict is one of the longest running in the world, a simmering, murky battle between increasingly radicalized militants who operate in the shadows of society and a security force that can be brutal, even when lethally effective.]
By
Steven Lee Myers
BAKSAN,
Russia — On Friday, exactly a week before the Olympics were set to open just
180 miles away, Russia’s security forces appeared on Makhov Street at 8:30 a.m.
and cordoned off the area around a brick and stone house. One of the men inside
called his father, who said it was the first he had heard from his son in 10
months.
“He
said, ‘Papa, we’re surrounded,' ” the father said. “ 'I know they’re going to
kill us.’ Then he said farewell.”
The
Russians and the men inside exchanged gunfire, pausing only to allow a woman
and two children to leave the house. By the time the shooting ended in the
afternoon, four men inside were dead, according to official accounts. The
Russians then blew up the house, leaving a bloodied pile of rubble and a crowd
of sullen, angry neighbors.
For
the first time in history, the Olympics are being held on the edge of a war
zone. The conflict is one of the longest running in the world, a simmering,
murky battle between increasingly radicalized militants who operate in the
shadows of society and a security force that can be brutal, even when lethally
effective.
The
symbolic importance of the Games for Russia and for President Vladimir V. Putin
has turned Sochi itself into a tantalizing target for Islamic terrorists who
have vowed a wave of attacks to advance their goal of establishing an
independent caliphate across the North Caucasus.
The
threat has prompted the Kremlin to mount what officials and experts have
described as the most extensive security operations in the history of sporting
events, sealing off the city and conducting months of operations like the one
here to crush militant cells across a region that stretches from Dagestan on
the Caspian Sea to Sochi on the Black Sea, using tactics that critics say only
fuel more violence.
“It’s
terrifying what’s happening now: the total destruction of our youth,” the
father said, agreeing to speak only if not identified because he feared
reprisal. “Everyone is scared. Everyone is running away. Some go to Moscow.
Some further away. People start to protect themselves after things like this.”
The
Olympics have focused new attention on this country’s most-wanted terrorist,
Doku Umarov, and threats of fanatical attacks like the ones in Volgograd that
killed 34 people in December when suicide bombers struck mass transit. But the
war in Russia more often takes the shape of events in places like Baksan.
Rustam Matsev, a lawyer in the republic, Kabardino-Balkaria, called it “a
slow-motion civil war.”
Launch
media viewerLocals near the rubble of a house that was destroyed during a
counterterrorism operation in Baksan, Russia. Sergey Ponomarev for The New York
Times
Even
if Russia succeeds in keeping Sochi safe, the violence is certain to grind on
here in the Caucasus when international attention moves on, nurtured by the
nihilistic ideology of the international jihad and punctuated by terrorist
attacks outside the region that experts say Russia, like other countries, will
never be able to prevent completely.
“You
don’t need much to do this,” said Ekaterina Sokirianskaia, the North Caucasus
project director for the International Crisis Group. “You need a committed
jihadi and a bomb, which is quite cheap and you can make it at home. It’s
difficult to deal with.”
In
2013, violence between militants and security forces left 529 people dead in
the North Caucasus, according to a list compiled by the news site Caucasian
Knot that does not include the attacks in Volgograd, a city farther north. Of
those killed, 127 were Russian security officers, a death toll on a scale of
the 160 soldiers who died during the same period in NATO’s war in Afghanistan.
The
level of violence has dropped significantly since tens of thousands died during
Russia’s two wars against separatists in Chechnya, who once hoped the collapse
of the Soviet Union in 1991 would clear the way for the republic’s
independence. The second war, under Mr. Putin’s leadership, lasted 10 years,
but it crushed the rebels and drove the Chechen rebel commanders underground or
“into the forest.” There, they gradually turned the cause of Chechnya’s
independence into a broader, more radical vision of holy war that has little
popular support but has nonetheless attracted adherents across the region.
Chechnya
is no longer even the deadliest republic in the region, according to Caucasian
Knot, having been surpassed in deaths and injuries last year by some of its
neighbors, notably Dagestan, now the most dangerous region in Russia;
Ingushetia; and Kabardino-Balkaria.
Mr.
Umarov, who is described as Russia’s Osama bin Laden, has led the insurgency
since 2006, but his influence and operational command are now a matter of
dispute. Many officials and experts describe him as little more than a
figurehead for a diffuse constellation of terrorist cells operating independently.
Some think he might even be dead.
“For
an insurgent, he’s quite an old guy,” Ms. Sokirianskaia said. “He’s nearly 50.
He’s had many injuries. I can’t rule out that he’s dead.”
The
terrorist cells are now so small and so deeply underground that they appear
unable to undertake the sort of large-scale operations that seared Russia early
in Mr. Putin’s rule, including the siege of a theater in Moscow in 2002 and a
school in Beslan in 2004, both of which involved dozens of fighters.
“There
is no real organization there,” said Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russia’s
security forces from New York University who is now conducting research in
Moscow. “There are people who are networked together.”
He
expressed doubt that Mr. Umarov would have known in advance of the bombings in
Volgograd, for example, even though a previously unknown cell from Dagestan
claimed responsibility for it last month, saying that it was carrying out his
threat last summer to attack the Games.
As
the attacks in Volgograd showed, the insurgents can still carry out spectacular
and deadly suicide attacks against “soft” targets like trains, stations and
buses, if not at will, then at least with appalling regularity. While attacks
in the Caucasus often target Russian security operations, those outside appear
intended to maximize terror by striking at civilians. That kind of attack,
rather than one in Sochi itself, experts say, is more likely during the
Olympics.
The
Spread of Rebel Attacks in the North Caucasus
RUSSIA
TAKES OVER Violence started to spread beyond the borders of Chechnya after
Russia retook control of the republic in 2000. That year, Russian forces pushed
rebels into mountainous and forested areas near and across the borders with
neighboring provinces.
While
suicide bombings have been a recurring tactic since the second Chechen war —
giving life to the lurid mythology of the “black widows,” women avenging the
deaths of husbands, fathers, brothers or sons — the motive has shifted,
according to Ms. Sokirianskaia. Those women now, she said, are driven less by a
clear political goal than by the pursuit of martyrdom and heavenly reward.
Paradoxically,
the most radicalized vision of an Islamic insurgency has little appeal among
the majority of people in the region. There is no cult of martyrdom here except
online. While the region is overwhelmingly Muslim, few appear to support either
the goal of separatism or the imposition of an explicitly Islamic form of
government.
The
actions of the Russian security officers, however, fuel resentment, as do
ethnic tensions and impoverishment. In Kabardino-Balkaria’s capital, Nalchik, a
sense of disenfranchisement resulted in an uprising against security forces in
2005 that resulted in 135 deaths.
Muslim
Presence in the Region
The
North Caucasus has been in turmoil since the breakup of the Soviet Union in the
1990s. The separatist insurgency in Chechnya, a predominantly Muslim republic,
gained a religious tone in its war against Russia. Violence and collective
punishments by Russian forces aggravated Muslims in the region, and boosted an
Islamist insurgency.
“People
do not support them actively, but they do not resist,” Murat Khokonov, a
professor of physics at Kabardino-Balkaria State University, said of the
insurgent networks. “They don’t trust the security structures. They don’t trust
the police.”
The
insurgency has been driven so far underground that the reverberations in
society are usually felt only when militants battle police. On the night of
Jan. 11, in a small village near Baksan, Khizir Tlyepshev told his wife that he
was leaving for the public bathhouse shortly before Russia’s security forces
cordoned off the area, searching for four men who had sprayed a police car with
bullets. When officers came to their house, they demanded to know the location
of a bunker. “What bunker?” his wife, Ramyeta, said she had told them.
Ten
days later, officers in masks came a second time.
Inside
a chicken coop behind the house, where the Tlyepshevs’ four children often
played, the officers uncovered a shallow trench, and there, the authorities
said, they found four containers with more than 100 pounds of explosives. Mrs.
Tlyepsheva said she had no idea the trench was there, how the explosives were
put there or whether her husband could have been involved.
Mr.
Tlyepshev, who has not returned or contacted his wife since that night, worked
as a builder. Like the majority of Muslims in southern Russia, he showed no
outward signs of embracing a radical strain of Islam, let alone aiding the
amorphous networks of fighters who do, his wife said. She does not know whether
he is in custody or in hiding, an accomplice of Russia’s insurgency or a victim
of its security forces. She does not know if he is alive.
“I
feel like I’m trapped between them,” Mrs. Tlyepsheva said.
On
the eve of Sochi, even the Olympics, portrayed by officials and state news
media as a unifying celebration of the country’s re-emergence on the world
stage, are regarded with ambivalence here. The monumental relay of the Olympic
flame, a staged event that went as far as the North Pole and the International
Space Station, was sharply curtailed in the Caucasus, held inside well-guarded
stadiums, including those in Dagestan, in Chechnya and, last week, in Nalchik.
Many
of the ethnic groups in the Caucasus are related to the Circassians, who
consider Sochi part of their homeland, conquered by the Russians in the 19th
century after what activists today hope to publicize as an act of genocide.
A
Diverse Landscape
The
crest of the Caucasus divides Europe and Asia. The region is home to dozens of
ethnic groups. Much of the area is a cultural patchwork where languages can
vary from one valley to the next.
Valery
Khatashukov, the chairman of the Human Rights Center in Nalchik, said that
Russia stirred resentment by continuing to treat the region as a colony to be
conquered. Instead of holding elections, Mr. Putin’s Kremlin simply appoints
leaders, leaving the people disenfranchised.
Mr.
Matsev, the lawyer, echoed the ambivalence of the plight that ensnared Mrs.
Tlyepsheva’s husband. She did not oppose the police. Nor did she support the
insurgency.
“It’s
like an unhappy marriage where there can be no divorce,” he said “There is too
much in common to divorce — the ties are too close — but too much has happened
to be happy together.”
Andrew
Roth contributed reporting.
