http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?p=65526Last month was a bloody one in Russia. On December 29th and 30th, two suicide bombings in the southern city of Volgograd killed a combined total of 34 people and injured many more. In the process, they shone a rare spotlight on the true state of Russia’s counterterrorism policy.
The picture isn’t pretty. Some two decades after it was ignited by the USSR’s breakup, the Islamist insurgency in Russia’s troubled North Caucasus regions has proven to be remarkably resilient. In its most recent Country Reports on Terrorism, the State Department noted that 182 terrorist incidents, resulting in 659 casualties, took place in Russia just in the year 2012 (the last for which complete statistics are available). The overwhelming majority of these attacks took place in the North Caucasus.
Moreover, this state of affairs persists despite the overwhelming military force marshaled over the past two decades by the Russian government, first in Chechnya and subsequently in adjoining regions (in particular Dagestan and Ingushetia). In fact, although the number of terrorist incidents in Russia has declined significantly from an all-time high of nearly 800 in 2009, the past several years nonetheless have seen a number of major attacks — including the 2010 bombing of the Moscow subway, the 2011 attack on Moscow’s Domodedovo airport, and three separate suicide bombings in Volgograd last year. In other words, despite Russian president Vladimir Putin’s declaration several years ago that the country had turned a corner in its fight against what Russians generally term “Wahhabism,” Islamic extremism in Russia is still very much alive and kicking.