Chechen Terrorism

Background

The roots and background of current terrorist activity in Russia can be traced back to the mid-1990s. Following the demise of the Soviet Union, the Chechen Republic declared its independence from the Russian Federation, which led the Russian military to conduct a campaign in Chechnya between 1994 and 1996 under the banner of reimposing constitutional order. Even in this period, Russia was already experiencing large-scale terrorist activity and hostage-taking incidents across its territory, carried out by Chechen separatist groups. These included the taking of hostages in a hospital in the southern Russian city of Budyonnovsk in June 1995, and another major hostage crisis in Kizlyar-Pervomayskoye in January 1996. Both incidents involved well over a thousand hostages. During the interwar period (1996–1999), The Russian military campaign ended with the signing of the Khasavyurt Accords on August 30, 1996, and in the period between the signing of these accords and the launch of the second military action in Chechnya in 1999, the nature of the separatist movement inside Chechnya and of terrorist activity itself, changed. The aims of actors carrying out terrorist attacks gradually shifted from seeking independence and secessionism to much more multifaceted goals.

Following the incursion of armed groups of Dagestanis, Chechens, and Arabs from Chechnya into Dagestan, in the North Caucasus, a terrorist attack on Russian military barracks, and a string of apartment bombings in Buynaksk, Moscow, and Volgodonsk in 1999, the Russian military launched a second large-scale military campaign in Chechnya in September of that year. The campaign was presented by the Russian authorities as a counterterrorist operation. This distinction between the nature of the two military campaigns in Chechnya reflected the differing aims of the two operations, with the first targeting secessionists and the second seeking to eradicate both domestic and international terrorists active in the republic. The Russian state officially ended the counterterrorist operation in Chechnya on April 17, 2009.

Since 2001, the Russian government has argued that large-scale fighting in Chechnya has ceased, prompting the authorities to introduce a policy of “normalisation” in Chechnya, aimed at the transfer of administrative control to the leadership of the Chechen Republic. However, low-intensity clashes continued, and terrorist activity spread to the other republics of the North Caucasus. Laterally, insecurity and terrorist activity in Chechnya itself has decreased significantly, particularly following the election of Ramzan Kadyrov as the Chechen president in 2007 and the creation of a more centralized power structure around him.

Terrorist Incidents in Russia, 2000–2004

In the early 2000s, and parallel to Russian counterterrorist campaigns, both in Chechnya and in North Caucasus, a wave of terrorist incidents took place in the Russian Federation. These terrorist actions were carried out by a loose alliance of Chechen and other North Caucasus groups, as well as foreign fighters, under a joint banner of jihadi resistance and Chechen independence. A series of terakts (a Russian amalgamation of the English term terrorist acts) took place across Russia, taking the form of suicide bombings, car explosions, attacks on the Russian transport systems, and large-scale hostage taking. Among the most notable were a car explosion near a McDonald's on Pokryshkina Street in Moscow on October 19, 2002; a suicide bombing during a rock festival in Tushino, Moscow, on July 5, 2003; a suicide bombing of a military hospital in Mozdok in North Ossetia on August 1, 2003; and explosions on a train between Kislovodsk and Mineral'Nye Vody, in southern Russia, on December 5, 2003, on a train in Moscow on December 9, 2003, and on the Moscow metro [Page 127]on February 6, 2004. The Russian authorities attributed most of these terakts to terrorists originating from or operating in Chechnya.

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