Opinion

Bin Laden death weakens Russia insurgency

(Agencies)
Updated: 2011-05-04 08:49

MOSCOW - The killing of Osama bin Laden will dent the Islamist insurgency in Russia's mainly Muslim North Caucasus, a regional leader said on Tuesday.

The North Caucasus are plagued by violence, underpinned by Soviet-era deportations and two separatist wars in Chechnya since 1994, where rebels wanting to carve out a separate Islamic state stage near-daily attacks.

Though political analysts dismiss Russian government claims that al Qaeda plays a major role in the North Caucasus insurgency, they do not rule out such an influence.

"(His) elimination...will significantly reduce international terrorist activities in Russia and in particular, the North Caucasus," said Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, the Kremlin-backed leader of the Ingushetia region near Chechnya.

Websites loyal to the insurgency reported on bin Laden's death but have not yet discussed what the loss means to them or their campaign.

"It is well-known that terrorists are connected like links of a chain," read a statement by Yevkurov, who had survived an assassination attempt by a suicide bomber in 2009.

A leading al Qaeda mentor, Jordanian Sheikh Abu Mohammad al-Maqdisi, gives public statements of support for Russia's Islamist leader Doku Umarov, and several foreign insurgents belonging to the global terror group have been killed by Russian security forces in the North Caucasus over the past year.

"The tie to al Qaeda and the global jihadi revolutionary movement and alliance in the present is established," Gordon Hahn, a senior researcher at the U.S. Monterey Institute for International Studies, told Reuters.

However Hahn, who tracks Islamist violence in Russia, argued that "bin Laden's demise will (not) have a significant direct effect" on the North Caucasus insurgency due to established funding networks across the Middle East.

"The more sources they have, the more they can keep their operation going in tough times. They are very talented, motivated and I wouldn't underestimate them at all," he said.