Word: caucasus
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...June 5, Adilgerei Magomedtagirov, the interior minister of Dagestan, in Russia's North Caucasus, attended a wedding at a restaurant in the center of the republic's capital Makhachkala. When he stepped outside to talk to his brother and a co-worker, they were met with a spray of bullets shot from a nearby building. Magomedtagirov, who was also Dagestan's top police official, died almost instantly; three others, including the bride's father, were wounded, one fatally...
...shooting raised few eyebrows in Dagestan, where blood feuds and gang wars punctuate daily life. Magomedtagirov's assassination was one of a handful in the volatile North Caucasus region in a week, and it was the second murder of a high-ranking police officer in Dagestan within a month. But in Moscow, the news of Magomedtagirov's death was enough to give President Dmitri Medvedev a jolt. Although murders of civilians and police have become common in the North Caucasus, the killing of a prominent state worker is a sign that the region is slipping out of the Kremlin...
...North Caucasus region, located between Europe, Asia and the Middle East, consists of a cluster of semiautonomous republics, many of them Islamic, arranged around the Caucasus Mountains. It's one of the most ethnically diverse regions in the world, with over 40 distinct ethnic groups. Much of the violence is carried out by Muslim militants who have declared war on police and state officials, calling them anti-Islamic for their allegiance to Russia. Other clashes are interethnic, with a century of conflict behind them. Based on the escalating levels of violence over the past 20 years, including two wars...
...kinds of freaks are coming here to do harm on our territory," Medvedev said to reporters when he visited Makhachkala on Tuesday. "This is a gauntlet thrown down to authority, to the state." But those "freaks" are actually most likely locals, brought up within the North Caucasus' clan system in which violence and corruption are the law of the land. "The problems for every territory are different," Alexei Makarkin, deputy general director of the think tank Center for Political Technologies in Moscow, tells TIME. "The one thing they all have in common is a culture of clans. This stops...
Medvedev told the security council of Dagestan that since the beginning of the year, a total of 235 people - 48 civilians, 112 bandits and 75 law enforcement officers - have been killed in the North Caucasus. Observers believe the real number to be much higher. Following Medvedev's visit, two policemen in Dagestan were killed by gunmen on Tuesday afternoon. On Wednesday, the deputy chief judge of the Supreme Court of Ingushetia was murdered by unidentified gunmen outside a kindergarten...