Word: guerrilla
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Moscow has defined this war as an attempt to weed out a hard core of militant separatist guerrillas from within the wider Chechen population, and destroy it. Russia blames those militants for terrorist attacks in Russia and attempts to foment a separatist rebellion in neighboring Dagestan, as well as for the atmosphere of chaos and criminality that has prevailed in Chechnya over the past three years. But Moscow's methods in the field have been those of conventional warfare, bringing overwhelming force to bear in order to capture territory. And the art of guerrilla warfare is not to hold territory...
...beatings," says Meier. "Now the Chechen population fears the Russians are planning the same thing all over again." Frustration may prompt Russia to pursue more brutal and indiscriminate measures, which makes it more likely that the Chechen population will become alienated from Russian forces rather than from the guerrillas - in other words, the waters will become hostile less to the fish than to the fishermen. And, as guerrilla wars from Vietnam to Afghanistan have shown, without winning over the civilian population it's extremely difficult for even the best-armed conventional armies to prevail against a committed guerrilla army fighting...
...history of counterinsurgency warfare suggests that defeating the Chechen guerrilla forces requires a political strategy to win over the bulk of Chechnya's civilian population. Following Mao Zedong's analogy that guerrillas are fish and a sympathetic civilian population is the water in which they swim, the art of counterinsurgency is to poison the water by turning civilians against the guerrillas. And Russia had reason for optimism going into the campaign. "Many Chechens are opposed to the Islamic militants like Shamil Basayev and Khattab, who the Russians claim to be targeting," says Meier. "Even more may have been prepared...
...paper and wrote a letter from his Turkish prison cell. In it, he urged the European Union to look kindly on his jailers' application for membership to the 15-member economic and political community - an unusual action for a man who has spent 15 years fighting a vicious guerrilla war against Turkey. But the Kurdish rebel leader reaped the benefit Wednesday, when Turkey voted to delay his execution - a punishment handed down on grounds of treason - pending a hearing by the European Court of Human Rights. Turkey's signature on the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights requires...
...weekend highlighted the limits of Russian control despite its territorial gains in the first months of the war. The Chechens for the most part retreated in the face of Russian air power, armor and artillery, insisting their plan was to draw the Russians in and then harass them through guerrilla action. "Now we're entering the phase of a brutal and bitter partisan war in which the Chechens attack at night and try and raise the cost of the Russian siege," says Meier. "And the Russian military is clearly undecided about how to proceed. Even though it may be politically...