You're reading: Russian forces kill eight suspected militants in Dagestan

MOSCOW - Russian security forces killed eight suspected militants in the North Caucasus province of Dagestan after storming a house where they were hiding with women and children, Russian anti-terrorism officials and law enforcement sources said on Friday, July 27.

More than a decade after federal forces toppled a separatist
government in a war in Chechnya, Russia is still struggling to
contain an Islamic insurgency across its mainly Muslim Caucasus
mountains region.

The ranks of militants fighting to carve an Islamic state
out of Russia’s southern fringe are swelled by anger over
joblessness and allegations of police brutality and pervasive
corruption.

The special forces surrounded the house in Alburikent, on
the outskirts of the provincial capital of Makhachkala, in an
overnight raid, Russia’s National Anti-Terrorism Committee (NAK)
said.

All-night negotiations failed, the committee said, and after
the rebels opened fire, the special forces let the children out
and stormed the house.

“The rebels responded to an invitation to surrender with
intensive shooting,” NAK said in a statement.

One of the victims was a woman who, pretending to turn
herself in, approached the special forces and detonated an
explosive belt strapped to her body, the committee said. She was
killed, but no officers were hurt, it added.

Two law enforcement sources, speaking on condition of
anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to the
press, said eight bodies had been found so far in the house.

On Thursday, federal security forces killed two rebels in
another Caucasus Mountain province, Kabardino-Balkaria, NAK
said.

Nearly daily shootouts and suicide bombings have taken place
in Dagestan, and insurgents have also launched deadly attacks on
the Russian heartland.

Doku Umarov, the leader of the Islamist insurgency, claimed
responsibility for a suicide bombing at Moscow’s Domodedovo
airport that killed 37 people in January 2011 and twin bombings
that killed 40 people in the Moscow metro in 2010.

Fears that violence may be spreading beyond North Caucasus
arose last week when a car bomb and shooting rocked the largely
peaceful province of Tatarstan, long seen as a model of
religious tolerance, east of Moscow in central
Russia.