Welcome to Chechnya's Second Front

At 11 p.m. on June 21, Timur Aliyev was working late. Suddenly he and his staff at the Public Development Institute in Nazran, the main town in the tiny Northern Caucasus republic of Ingushetia, heard gunfire. For the next three hours they watched as gunmen attacked the nearby headquarters of the Interior Ministry and the Russian border guards. The gunmen — apparently rebels from neighboring Chechnya — "appeared from nowhere," Aliyev recalls, and they left the same way, leaving the Ministry buildings and military sites in four towns in ruins, and almost 100 police, soldiers and civilians dead, among them the...

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