* Volley of deadly bombings in Volgograd kills 41 in three
months
* Insurgency leader Umarov vows to attack Winter Games
* Involvement of ethnic Russians in attacks marks new
strategy
By Alissa de Carbonnel
MOSCOW, Jan 1 (Reuters) – The suspected involvement of
converts to Islam in Russian suicide bombings points to the
growing reach of jihadists far beyond the Muslim provinces of
Chechnya and Dagestan, where insurgency and separatism have
simmered for two decades.
Russian news media say the authorities suspect an
ethnic-Russian convert to Islam may have been behind one of the
two suicide bombings that killed a total of 34 people in the
past two days in Volgograd, a southern Russian city.
Another convert is suspected of building a bomb used to kill
seven people in the same city two months ago.
The attacks came half a year after two Chechen brothers who
had lived in Dagestan became the suspects in the Boston Marathon
bombings that killed three Americans, sign that a conflict once
seen as remote by the West could have consequences far afield.
Security experts say that insurgents have used ethnic
Russians to carry out attacks in other parts of Russia, both
because of the symbolism of their conversion to radical Islam
and because Slavic appearance could help them avoid detection.
“This is a new strategy that we have been seeing more often
lately. It’s a massive problem for law enforcement agencies,”
said Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russia’s security services.
Pavel Pechyonkin, named by Russian news agencies as a
possible suspect in the first of two attacks within 24 hours – a
suicide bomb that killed 18 people at Volgograd’s railway
station on Sunday – was a paramedic from the Mari El region in
central Russia.
An ethnic Russian on his father’s side, he converted to
Islam, his mother’s religion.
He left home in 2011 to join insurgents in Dagestan, his
parents said earlier this year in a video message posted on the
Internet, appealing to their son to lay down arms.
In response, Pechyonkin recorded his own video message,
saying he was following God’s will.
“Here Muslims are being killed and kidnapped … Why should
we follow those Christian commandments, when Allah urges us to
fight those kafirs? Why shouldn’t we leave their children
orphaned?” he said, wearing a green tunic and skull cap.
Authorities also believe an ethnic Russian from the Moscow
suburbs, Dmitry Sokolov, built a suicide explosive belt
detonated by his Dagestani wife in a bus bombing in Volgograd in
October, law enforcement sources in Dagestan said.
The two met on online Islamist chat rooms. Sokolov was
killed by Russian security forces in November, alongside four
other militants in a house in Dagestan.
RECRUITS FROM AS FAR AS CANADA
Vladimir Putin crushed separatists in Chechnya when he rose
to power 14 years ago. But an Islamist insurgency spread to
neighbouring Dagestan and remains the deadliest conflict in
Europe. Fighters have recruited to their ranks from as far
afield as Canada.
Yekaterina Sokirianskaya, a Caucasus expert at International
Crisis Group, says many new converts adopt a fundamentalist form
of Islam that often puts them in conflict with their families
and makes them more prone to “radicalisation”.
“They are very attractive to insurgents,” Sokirianskaya
said. “The last attack could have been carried out only by a
Slavic man, this is clear, because security measures were
tightened and a women in a hijab would have been noticed.”
Heavy security around Sochi means an attack on the Black Sea
resort city where the Olympics will be held in February would be
extremely difficult, security experts say, but the greatest
potential threat is from a suicide bomber.
“This is very effective tactic. It requires very little
preparation and very little money, but it is very hard to stop,”
Alexei Filatov, deputy head of the veterans’ association of the
Alfa anti-terrorism unit.
Russian police have launched a security operation making no
secret that they are targeting migrants from Muslim areas. A
bomber recruited from another part of Russia, preferably with a
Russian-sounding name, would have an easier time reaching a
target than one with a Muslim name whose identity documents were
issued in Chechnya or Dagestan.
More than 120 people have become suicide bombers during
Putin’s rule, Grigory Shvedov, editor of website Kavkaz-uzel.ru,
which tracks the unrest.
A harsh crackdown on adherents of the strict Salafist strand
of Islam practiced by militants has added fuel to the
insurgency, Shvedov and other experts say.
“Although brute force is being used in the North Caucasus
now, they (the authorities) cannot build a wall thick enough to
prevent terrorists from slipping out,” Shvedov said.
CAUCASUS EMIRATE
Local militant groups in Chechnya, Dagestan and other North
Caucasus provinces united in 2007 under the leadership of Doku
Umarov, a former Chechen rebel, whose Caucasus Emirate group
says it was behind suicide bombings that killed 37 people at a
Moscow airport in 2011 and 40 on the Moscow subway in 2010.
He urged his fighters in a video posted online in July to
use “maximum force” to prevent Putin staging the Olympics.
Volgograd, about a day’s drive north along a main highway
from the Caucasus, is a far easier target for militants than
Sochi, the site of the Olympics, 700 km (440 miles) away.
Sochi, a 145-km (90-mile) long stretch of coastal resorts
where Putin himself spends his summer holidays, has had its
security beefed up with forces drawn from other cities. It is
shielded by impassable mountains on one side and the Black Sea
on the other, and can only be approached by air or a heavily
guarded coastal road.
If they cannot reach Sochi itself, militants may have
calculated instead on the symbolic value of sowing panic in
Volgograd, one of the biggest cities in southern Russia with
more than 1 million people.
The attack subverts its image as bastion of Russian strength
earned through victory in a decisive battle in World War Two,
when the city was known as Stalingrad.
“A symbol of Russia’s tragedy and triumph in World War Two
has been singled out by the terrorists precisely because of its
status in people’s minds,” said Dmitry Trenin, the director of
the Moscow Carnegie Centre.
(Additional reporting by Alexei Anischuk and Gabriela Baczynska
in Moscow and Maria Tsvetkova in Volgograd; Editing by Peter
Graff)
