Suicide Bombings in Russia: Game Changer in Russo-U.S. Partnership?

Coming on the heels of the suicide bomber attacks in front of a Kabardino Balkaria  mosque  is the suicide bomb attack In Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), 520 miles from the Northern Caucasus.  The female Jihadist from Dagestan, wearing a green scarf, blew herself up in a bus, killing six people and wounding 33 others. It is the first such attack In Russia in five years.   No wonder one of President Putin´s concerns about Syria is that the Chechens fighting with the rebels there ll employ their acquired battlefield experience against Russia during the Sochi Winter Olympics. 

Since tsarist times the tribes of the Northern Caucasus have  been the Achilles Heel of the Russian Empire. Presently they are undergoing a Muslim revival which bodes more uproar as they are increasingly being absorbed into global jihad.  Indeed, these writers witnessed the ongoing Muslim revival during our 2007 visit to the Northern Caucasus.

 Traveling from Stavropol with a cab driver, who was constantly reporting our position to militia, we were stopped at a Russian checkpoint, its guards equipped with automatic weapons. At that time, however, we were allowed to enter the Kabardino Balkaria republic where one of the bombings recently took place.  Of course we could not visit Chechnya or Dagestan.

 Passing   through a little valley town with rundown dwellings and fenced gardens, we followed a winding road by a bubbling river, gaping up at mountains higher than the Alps.  Along, the way we were surprised by the number of new mosques, built, as we were told, by Middle East sponsors.  At a sloping cable car station we found a wonderful little flea market where Moslem babushkas and old men were vending handmade sweaters, fur slippers, sheepskin hats, animal skins and home canned goods.  We also talked to two young women in hijibs who told us adamantly in Russian they would never marry a Russian man. There was no antipathy, however, towards these two Americans, and no sense of danger in this serene setting.

Three years later we also interviewed a close relative of the late Chechen president, Dzhochar Dudeyev, killed by a Russian missile.  We learned that the Chechens had come to the Muslim religion centuries later than the rest of the Middle East, and that Chechens were a largely secular culture in which women could hold jobs.    

What surprises and alarms us frankly, is the rapidity with which some Chechens appear to have been infiltrated and coopted by Al Qaeda, the danger now mushrooming in once peaceful Kabardino Balkaria. The global Jihad movement appears to be happening with frightening speed.

 As America also experienced a terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon last summer emanating from this region of the Northern Caucasus, we hope the latest bombings may provide a game changing opportunity for our closer cooperation with Russia against terrorism.