SEVEN Russian soldiers and three policemen were killed in rebel attacks in Chechnya over the past day, an official in the Kremlin-backed Chechen administration said. A Russian military official meanwhile reported that 22 rebels have been killed over the past two days in an operation in one of the republic’s southern areas. The casualty toll is one of the largest reported by Russia from an operation in several months. The Chechen official said four servicemen died when Russian military outposts came under fire and three others died when a truck was blown up and then fired on. He said the three policemen died in attacks in or near Grozny, the Chechen capital, which is deeply infiltrated with rebels despite a massive Russian military presence. Russia’s soldiers vastly outnumber the rebels and have heavier weaponry, but they have been unable to uproot rebels from Grozny or from the mountainous southern third of the republic. The rebels attack soldiers near-daily in hit-and-run assaults and kill others with land mines or remote-controlled explosives.
| It doesn't sound like their operations are being driven by reliable intel... |
Col. Ilya Shabalkin, a spokesman for the regional headquarters for the Chechen operation, said that 22 rebels had been killed near the southern Chechnya village of Serzhen-Yurt in fighting that began after Russian reconnaissance forces discovered a rebel base, the Interfax news agency reported.
Serzhen-Yurt, as I noted before, was Khattab’s old digs back during the initial invasion of Dagestan. From the looks of things, his successors decided to try and reopen the training camp there with predictable enough results. |