Four police and ten gunmen were killed Wednesday, investigators said, in clashes in Russia's Dagestan region in the North Caucasus where the Kremlin is struggling to contain an Islamist insurgency.
All of the policemen and six militants were killed in an exchange of gunfire that erupted after gunmen in a house near the city of Derbent on the Caspian Sea refused to surrender their weapons, the federal Investigative Committee said.
Four officers were also wounded in the fighting.
In a separate incident, four militants were killed and a policeman injured in the center of Derbent overnight, local investigators said.
Youths angry about poverty and fueled by the ideology of global jihad stage near-daily attacks in the mainly Muslim North Caucasus — most of them in Dagestan, Ingushetia and Chechnya, site of two separatist wars with Moscow since the mid-1990s.
Many want to carve out their own sharia, pan-Caucasus state that is separate from Russia.
Twin suicide bombings on the Moscow metro in March which killed 40 people turned the global spotlight on the region. Authorities blamed the attacks on two women from Dagestan.
Wednesday’s attacks bring the total of deaths to at least 30 in June across the North Caucasus. Late Wednesday, Chechnya’s leader Ramzan Kadyrov said at least one militant was found dead after fighting in wooded mountains in the province’s south.
Though the Kremlin pours billions of dollars into the North Caucasus, where unemployment in some regions is as high as 50 percent, government and religious leaders say many youths are still turning to the insurgency.
