Fighting erupts in Chechenya
Foreign Desk Report

NALCHIK (Russia)—Chechen fighters attacked police and army buildings in a southern Russia town on Thursday in a brazen operation that killed dozens and challenged Kremlin assertions it had the turbulent Caucasus under control.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who came to power in 2000 by talking tough on Chechnya, stepped into the crisis, ordering his security forces to throw a ring of steel round the town of Nalchik and kill any gunman who put up resistance.
“The president gave an instruction that not one gunman should be allowed to leave the town, and those who are armed and putting up resistance must be wiped out,” Deputy Interior Minister Alexander Chekalin said after meeting Putin, Interfax news agency reported.
Justice officials said in a morning of mayhem in which up to 100 rebels attacked key security points in Nalchik, main city of the Muslim Kabardino-Balkaria region near rebel Chechnya, 12 local residents were killed as well as 12 police. Deputy state prosecutor Vladimir Kolesnikov said 20 fighters were killed and 12 of their number seized by security forces.
Footage broadcast by Russia’s NTV television station showed several corpses lying in the streets in pools of blood and covered over with blankets during the attack launched around 9 a.m. and winding down around midday.
The Kremlin envoy to southern Russia, Dmitry Kozak, said on state television the gunmen had stormed one police station and taken hostages. But officials quoted by Itar-Tass news agency said they were later freed, though there were no details. Kozak said that overall the town was under control.
“There is no mass attack going on. The bandits who attacked police stations and some other government buildings have been dispersed for the most part,” he said. Kolesnikov said, however, two fighters were holed up in a shop in the center of Nalchik, while seven fighters — two of them wounded — were putting up resistance from inside an interior ministry building. The closely coordinated attack on police, army and Federal Security Service (FSB) points in the garrison town marked the first major rebel operation since Abdul-Khalid Sadulayev took over as leader of the Chechen separatists in March.
It was in line with his threat to broaden the war against Russian troops in Chechnya to encompass the whole of the mainly Muslim north Caucasus region. Kolesnikov, speaking to journalists, said up to 100 fighters had simultaneously attacked three police stations and other buildings housing border guards, FSB state security officials, special riot police and an anti-terrorist center. The separatists, who have been fighting for independence from Russia for more than a decade, were quick to claim responsibility for the assault on Nalchik, a town of about 280,000 people.
“Forces of the Caucasus Front — a unit of the Chechen Republic’s Armed Forces — went into the town, including attack brigades from the Kabardino-Balkarian Yarmuk (Islamist brigade),” a statement on their Web site www.kavkazcenter.com said. Kabardino-Balkaria is one of several Muslim regions in the Caucasus and borders the North Ossetia province where Chechen militants attacked a school in Beslan in September 2004, resulting in the deaths of 331 people, half of them children. Putin was seriously criticized for remaining silent for too long at the beginning of the Beslan drama.
His decision to step publicly into the Nalchik crisis, with his tough talk, appeared to show he was learning from that mistake. At the height of the fighting, automatic firing resounded around the town and smoke rose from one of the main police buildings under attack. Children were evacuated from a school nearby. “I just woke up when an explosion went off. I could see buildings were on fire. Buildings in the center are burning,” a local man, who did not wish to be named, told Reuters by telephone. “I’ve heard grenades, machine guns, heavy machine guns,” he said.
Tass quoted police as saying the attackers had operated in 10 mobile groups, targeting five or six strategic points — police buildings, Russian army units and a gun store. An attempt to seize the regional airport was repelled, agencies said. In North Ossetia, scene of the Beslan school bloodbath, security forces were put on high alert. The attack was reminiscent of an operation in June 2004 when pro-Chechen militants attacked police buildings in Nazran and effectively took control of the Ingushetia region — near to Kabardino-Balkaria — for several hours. About 60 people, many of them police, were killed in that attack.