Battle Hits Dagestan Capital

The capital of Dagestan endured a full-scale battle at the weekend after the authorities used tank fire to destroy a house they said was being occupied by Islamic militants.

A day of bloodshed in Makhachkala and in the nearby town of Kaspiisk ended with the deaths of at least five militants and three policemen. Dagestani officials said their operation had prevented a repetition of the school seizure in the North Ossetian town of Beslan in September, while local people were bewildered by the ferocity of the attack.

A leading Dagestani official said the gunmen killed on the outskirts of Makhachkala belonged to an extremist group called Jennet (or “Paradise” in Arabic), led by Rasul Makasharipov, a former translator for the late Saudi guerrilla fighter Khattab, who was active in Chechnya.

The Dagestani interior ministry said Jennet had been responsible for the killing of 29 members of its department for fighting extremism and criminal terrorism, including its chief, Akhberdilav Akilov.

The first battle erupted at 5am on the morning of January 15 in Kaspiisk, a town on the Caspian Sea coast just to the south of Makhachkala. A group of Dagestani special forces led by Arzulum Ilyasov, the commander of the SOBR or “special unit for quick reaction”, went to a house to try to detain 50-year-old radical commander Magomedzagir Akayev.

The security personnel arrived during morning prayer and decided to arrest Akayev straightaway. However, a battle broke out in which two SOBR offices and Ilyasov himself were killed. Akayev was also killed and two fighters were captured alive.

Two hours later another operation began in Makhachkala, which lasted 15 hours. A group of militants took four locals, including a little girl, hostage, but eventually released them all. The authorities decided on the unprecedented step of calling out three tanks from the marine brigade in Kaspiisk. One of the tanks did not start and a second gave out on the road. The third however literally destroyed the house.

Itar-Tass correspondent Yury Safronov, who spent three days at the scene, told IWPR that the special forces had considered different ways of storming the building, including flooding the basement with water and using sleeping gas. In the end, the tank commander who destroyed the house was given 100 grams of vodka to steel him to the deed. His tank then began crushing the ruins into the ground.

Officials said they had killed five militants but it took them two days to dig their remains out of the ruined house. Standing in the ruined house, Nikolai Gryaznov, head of the FSB security service in Dagestan, said that the body of Makasharipov had been recognised by policemen who had seen him alive.

However, doubts were later expressed at this identification and the prosecutor’s office has said that further checks are needed.

These battles followed a New Year special operation in which 5,000 law enforcement officers were brought to Dagestan from across southern Russia in an attempt to deal with a growing number of kidnaps in the Khasavyurt region of western Dagestan.

All this has increased a general distrust amongst the local population for the 20,000-strong Dagestani police force, who have a reputation for corruption.

Elmira Kamalova, owner of the destroyed house, denounced the Makhachkala operation. “The police cannot defend themselves, they get shot at despite their unprecedented security measures,” she said, referring to the fortifications that have been put up around police stations in the republic. “How can they defend us if they are cut off from us?”

The local authorities defended the ferocity of their actions by saying that they were dealing with an especially dangerous group, which was planning a repeat of the Beslan school seizure in which more than 330 people died.

“We had information that the fighters wanted to carry out a terrorist operation like in Beslan,” said security chief Gryaznov. “They were well armed. One of them had a suicide belt.”

This was the fourth major military operation within the city involving special forces – and analysts are now questioning whether these tactics work.

Political analyst David Zulumkhanov told IWPR that local people were being kept in the dark about what was going on. “The population doesn’t really understand who is fighting whom and so it doesn’t support the security forces,” he said.

“If people in the city knew definitely the ideas and ideology which the authorities are representing, then it would not come to a fight. No one has explained to the population the ideological basis of the struggle - who the extremists are, why they need to be identified and destroyed.”

Ruslan Kurbanov, a specialist in the ethnic politics of Dagestan, noted that radical Islam, not politics, was now the driving force behind the militants fighting the authorities. And he said that corruption amongst the security forces was undermining their struggle against it.

“For a long time no one has believed in these legends about Arab ‘petrodollars’ which the militants are fighting for,” Kurbanov said. “The money is definitely coming in but it is being used to buy up officialdom, those same unhappy policemen, to forge documents and passports.

“In this battle the authorities will absolutely keep on taking losses because they are not ready for the fight. Only dialogue – not with the ultra-right wing of course but with the moderate opposition – can be a way out of the situation. Otherwise a lot of people will go off into the forests.”

Marat Biygishiev is a correspondent with Moskovsky Komsomolets-Dagestan.