Death by starvation By German Sadulayev, special to Prague Watchdog
A couple of weeks ago there were reports in the media about an Islamic insurgent who defected from a group of his fellow guerrillas in the forest. The nineteen-year-old youth had left the guerrilla encampment on the pretext of gathering firewood, run away and surrendered to the law enforcement bodies in the hope of receiving mercy from his compatriots. On local television he described the misery in the camp: the fear of the constant special operations, the obsolete weapons, the lack of ammunition and food. It was time to stock up for the winter, but there was no possibility of getting hold of any supplies. The “Forest Brethren” were facing starvation.
While one might have been forgiven for thinking that these reports were a staged fabrication, another gimmick in the information war, the fact is that lately there has been plenty of evidence from various sources that the situation for the guerrillas is indeed as the young man described. Dokka Umarov himself confirmed in his interview that the mujahedeen have a problem with obtaining food. They don’t have enough provisions, medicine and ammunition. What they do have are volunteers – steadily increasing numbers of young men, who so far have not defected.
The Chechen authorities’ policy of cutting the insurgents off from all material and military resources is bearing fruit. The insurgents’ supply lines have obviously been disrupted, and they have lost the sympathy and support of the local population, partly due to the authorities’ propaganda, and partly due to intimidation. Anyone who gives or sells a crust of bread to an insurgent can expect severe punishment as an accomplice of the terrorists.
Likewise, the insurgents’ own strategy, their reliance on terror – including terror against civilians – and on suicide bombing, cannot bring about a situation in which the local population will help them. But without connections in the “flatlands" it is impossible for them to organize supplies. Realizing this, the mujahedeen have moderated their bellicose rhetoric a little. The “Forest Brethren” need support from among the civilian population – not only new mujahedeen, who are willing to undergo deprivations and face death, but also the hesitant supporters who sympathize with the jihad, but remain in their homes. It is only with their help that the guerrilla units can be supplied with food and ammunition.
The first point that needs to be made is that if it is true that the insurgents are suffering a critical shortage of material resources, if they really are poor and hungry, then what is one to make of the stories about international terrorism and intelligence agents from countries hostile to Russia which are allegedly inspiring and funding the terrorists in order to prevent the region’s stabilization and undermine Russia’s prosperity? After all, this is the explanation that is uppermost in the statements of officials: the terrorism comes from abroad, it is not Russian or Chechen. Those who are to blame are insidious foreigners, Arab missionaries, envoys of Al-Qaeda and the agents of foreign secret services.. They are showering the mountains with sacks of dollars and the most modern weapons and equipment, and they are financing the bandits’ leaders.
But tell me, please: where is all this? Where are these latest weapons? There are only the old AKs which the guerrillas fire at the Russian jet fighters and are probably left over from the first Chechen War. SVD sniper rifles. Some small arms. And that is all.
And they have no money. If they really had enough money, there would be no problems with supplies, or at any rate the problems would not be so acute. The trouble is that the guerrillas don’t have all the piles of money that official propaganda says they have. That is why no one believed the insurgents when they claimed responsibility for the disaster at the Sayan-Shushenskaya hydroelectric plant. Only two or three years ago, such a statement would have been taken seriously. Today it is most likely that the insurgents do not have the resources or the financial capacity to organize a large-scale operation in far-off Russia. While the blowing up of power stations and the seizing of hostages are all still possible, they are very expensive, and the insurgents have no money.
And in what is happening now there is no trace of the hand of international terrorism and hostile intelligence services with their unlimited financial resources. The handwriting is not the same. That is the first fly in the ointment. This is not imported contraband terrorism. It's our own – Russian, Ingush, Chechen.
The second point is this: if everything is so bad, if the young men who take to the hills are doomed to hunger and hardship, and not just a heroic death, if all the tales of the thousands of dollars paid for each killed policeman are a myth, why do they go? Why do the young men take to the hills and the forests? They could join the police, the pay there is not so bad, they could take part in the republic-wide reconstruction project and would at least not go hungry, yet they take to the hills and the forests.
This is evidence of a global and catastrophic defeat for the official authorities in the ideological war. A defeat they are suffering in spite of all the resources they have devoted to countering the insurgents’ propaganda, in spite of their support for “traditional Islam” and their acts of intimidation, in spite of their massive carrot-and-stick policy – and with the result that all they are able to achieve are local successes, such as the disruption of supplies. And they find themselves totally unable to inflict on the enemy a final and crushing blow.
The insurgents do not have the funds to feed their new recruits and provide them with weapons and ammunition. Military operations are out of the question – there are not enough grenades and cartridges. But there is no lack of new recruits. There are not enough assault rifles for all of them. So what is the solution? A suicide belt. An improvised explosive device, a bicycle and off you go, to paradise. It’s cheap, and it’s reliable.
There is a distinct possibility that the present upsurge in suicide bombing is connected with the fact that the insurgents’ supply lines have been cut, that they don’t have the resources to maintain large units in the forests and mountains, and that the flow of volunteers keeps on growing and growing. To all of this, the tactic of suicide bombing is the “answer”.
And indirectly it is also a result of the blockade.
The official authorities’ “success” in blockading the insurgents and depriving them of material resources, coupled with the fact that in the sphere of ideology and spiritual matters the authorities are just as helpless as before, has led to an increase in the number of suicide bombers and suicide bombings, whose victims are inevitably people who have no connection with the resistance.
And the authorities’ victory has once again turned into the people's defeat.
Photo: proza.ru. (Translation by DM) (P,DM)
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