Welcome to Chechnya's Second Front

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At 11 p.m. on June 21, Timur Aliyev was working late. Suddenly he and his staff at the Public Development Institute in Nazran, the main town in the tiny Northern Caucasus republic of Ingushetia, heard gunfire. For the next three hours they watched as gunmen attacked the nearby headquarters of the Interior Ministry and the Russian border guards. The gunmen — apparently rebels from neighboring Chechnya — "appeared from nowhere," Aliyev recalls, and they left the same way, leaving the Ministry buildings and military sites in four towns in ruins, and almost 100 police, soldiers and civilians dead, among them the republic's Interior Ministry leadership. Russian President Vladimir Putin has claimed for years that the war in Chechnya was over; last week, a new front opened up in Ingushetia.

Until 2002 Ingushetia's President, Afghanistan war vet Ruslan Aushev, kept his republic out of the Chechen crossfire. He was sympathetic to the Chechens, even offering guerrillas medical treatment. He refused to send Ingush paramilitary police to Chechnya. In April, though, Aushev was replaced at Moscow's instigation by a former Russian Federal Security Service general, Murat Zyazikov, who toed the Kremlin hard line. Ingush and Chechens suspected of rebel sympathies started to disappear. The lightning strikes were the response. Until now, the assumption was that the insurgents were Chechens. Aliyev and other locals, though, assert that many were local Ingush. Says former Russian Parliament Speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov: "The war in Ingushetia, hitherto hidden from the public eye, has finally surfaced."