Word: chechenization
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...hostage standoff, diggers had been tunneling underneath the theater in preparation for an assault. Now in the early hours of Saturday, gunshots from inside had forced into action the waiting Spetsnaz commando troops in the elite Alfa and Vympel antiterror units of the Federal Security Service. The Chechen hostage takers, it seemed, were about to fulfill their death vow. They had sworn that if Russian President Vladimir Putin had not declared an end to the war in Chechnya by Saturday at dawn, they would start killing hostages. If they were assaulted, they made clear they were ready to blow...
...rescue was precipitated by a small, unexpected act of impatience. After three days locked in the stuffy, smelly auditorium, an agitated young male hostage had had enough. According to one account, he threw a bottle at some of his Chechen captors and ran toward them. A gunman opened fire, missed the youth and hit another man in the eye. "There was blood--foamy. A girl was hit in the side," said Olga Chernyak, an Interfax news reporter among the captives. "It happened right where I was. I thought they would kill us all." As hostages screamed, recalled Chernyak, "The Chechen...
Forty minutes later, all 53 Chechen rebels were dead or captive. Anya and more than 750 other hostages had escaped alive, including some 30 children and 75 foreigners. But at least 90 Russian citizens died in the operation: killed in cross fire, perhaps, or suffocated by the mysterious gas, or even felled by heart attacks. Russian officials stressed that the deaths resulted from the siege's privations and stress. Nevertheless, Moscow hospitals appealed for blood, and eyewitnesses saw unconscious bodies carried from the theater. Many of the freed were delivered straight to toxicological wards to be treated for gas poisoning...
...TIME.com: Why would it be a mistake to link Chechen terrorism to al-Qaeda...
...totally amoral. They gave a lot of thought as to how to place their bombs in the theater so as to kill 700 innocent civilians, simply on the grounds that the Russian forces kill a lot of people in Chechnya. And those sentiments may well deepen the ties between Chechen separatists and al-Qaeda. We're not seeing any sign, right now, of the cycle being broken. Those who seized the theater in Moscow may have hoped to get the Russian army out of Chechnya, but they're more likely to have provoked a new offensive. I don't think...