To See Syria’s Future, Look at Chechnya
4th December 2015
Putin has employed the tactic of turning a civil war into a counter-terrorist operation before—in Chechnya, where Russia launched a war in 1999 that lasted for almost a decade. The Kremlin regards its campaign in the small Muslim republic as a model of conflict resolution to be replicated elsewhere. Last year, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev called it “one of the business cards of Russia” and a “good, unique example in history of combat of terrorism.” In thinking about how Russia’s folly in Syria might develop, Chechnya provides a number of important lessons.
Russia’s war in Chechnya was brutal. The Kremlin initially defined all those who opposed its military action as terrorist sympathizers, entirely indistinguishable from Islamic extremists. It bombed the Chechen capital of Grozny indiscriminately, killing hundreds if not thousands of civilians (official figures were not compiled) and forcing thousands more from their homes. Later, it began to target moderate Chechens; in 2005, the FSB murdered Aslan Maskhadov, the democratically elected leader of Chechnya’s independence movement. His predecessor, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, was assassinated by car bomb in Qatar in 2004. Though the Russian government denied any involvement in the attack, a Qatari court convicted two Russian security agents for their roles in the bombing.