blog：Blowback in the Caucasus

The suicide bomber who detonated a truck packed with at least half a ton of explosives in Nazran, Ingushetia, Monday morning destroyed a five-story police station, killed 20 people and injured 138 more. But the bomber did more: he demolished the credibility of the Kremlin’s Caucasus policy. For nearly a decade, Moscow has relied on appointing local strongmen to rule the turbulent North Caucasus, allowing the locally recruited security forces of Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia to use whatever dirty tactics against opponents they choose. The result, documented in detail by the few human-rights monitors still brave enough to work in the region, has been an ongoing bloodbath of abductions, torture, extrajudicial executions, arrests of rebels’ family members, burnings of houses in reprisal for attacks—all in the name of securing stability in the Caucasus. But a dramatic upsurge in violence this summer, of which Monday’s bomb attack was the latest and worst, has been a brutal illustration of just how big a failure that policy has become. Instead of bringing peace to the Caucasus, the Kremlin-sanctioned death squads have only made the region’s rebels—a motley mixture of radical Islamists and tribal enemies of the ruling cliques—angrier, and more deadly.

Tags: Caucasus