In The Line Of Fire

• Share

Nothing much usually happens in Nalchik, capital of the obscure Caucasian republic of Kabardino-Balkaria. Mostly, tourists come to ski or climb in mountains that include Europe's highest, Elbrus. They buy honey and fruit from roadside markets or enjoy an easygoing approach to nightlife that particularly appeals to travelers from more conservative regions. The sleepy little republic, which is home to a mix of ethnic Russians and Muslims, was also largely free of the insurgency that has set much of the North Caucasus — Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia — aflame. Even when the security services cracked down on alleged radical Islamists, closing mosques and harassing bearded men, few people took note.

All that changed last week when around 100 heavily armed guerrillas fanned out across the city to attack at least 10 major government targets. The sudden assault completely surprised authorities, all the way to Moscow. For 24 hours, the rebels besieged Nalchik, leaving terrified inhabitants with nothing but wildly inaccurate reports from the official media to explain what was going on. By the time local security forces and reinforcements from neighboring republics regained control, the city of 250,000 bore all the grim scars of urban warfare: bodies sprawled on sidewalks, in back alleys and outside apartment blocks and official buildings. Kids roamed the streets collecting shell casings.

"We never thought this would happen here," says Anastasia Zaitseva, whose workplace, a hotel opposite the Federal Security Service (fsb) headquarters, was on the front line. "We always believed this tragedy would pass us by." Instead, the persistent insurgency in the North Caucasus keeps spreading — and what began in late 1994 as a war of secession in Chechnya is mutating into an Islamist jihad as it spills across the region.

Russian officials have regularly dismissed rebel threats to expand the war. Yet over the past two years fighting has progressed west from Chechnya to Ingushetia and North Ossetia, where last year hundreds died in the Beslan school siege. In the past 12 months, there have been almost daily attacks in Dagestan to the east. Now, the insurgency has moved north into Kabardino-Balkaria. Chechen secessionist websites hailed what they called a successful operation by the "Kabardino-Balkaria section of the Caucasus Front," praising it as proof that the strategy introduced by the Chechen insurgency's new leader, Abdul Khalim Sadulayev, was working. The 37-year-old cleric took over after his more moderate predecessor, Aslan Maskhadov, was killed in March. Since then, the tone and tactics of the conflict have taken a firmly radical turn. Rebel leaders go beyond criticizing the West's failure to denounce Russia's brutal tactics in Chechnya; they increasingly reject Western values based, they say, on "materialism and atheism." A "discussion document" circulating among Chechen guerrillas singles out Afghanistan's Taliban regime as the most theologically consistent modern Islamic state. The Islamist cast of the Nalchik attackers suggests that Russian President Vladimir Putin now faces a growing threat from religious radicals determined to push the fight deeper into Russia.

The siege of Nalchik started around 10 a.m. on an ordinary Thursday morning, just as shops and offices were opening. The fighters appeared out of nowhere, swarming across the city. They hit the headquarters of the fsb and Interior Ministry, several large police stations, and a prison. At the fsb, a minibus carrying six armed men in uniforms and ski masks pulled up in front of the building. They clambered out of the van and charged. Evgeniya Sokurova, the manager of the Rossia Hotel just opposite, noticed them. "I said, 'It looks like there are training exercises going on,'" she recalls. "Then there was an enormous explosion."