Dagestani Conflict
Since 2000, Dagestan has been the venue of a low-level guerilla war, bleeding over from Chechnya; the fighting has claimed the lives of hundreds of federal servicemen and officials – mostly members of local police forces – as well as many Dagestani national rebels and civilians.
More recently, among other incidents:
- On May 15, 2008, two MVD officers were killed and one police officer heavily wounded during an ambush on their vehicle in Gubden.
- On September 8, 2008, Abdul Madzhid and several rebels were killed in an ambush by Russian special forces.
- On October 21, 2008, rebels ambushed a Russian military truck, killing five troops and wounding nine others.
- On January 6, 2010, a suicide bomber attempted to blow up a police station in Makhachkala, killing six officers and wounding 14 others.
- On March 31, 2010, 12 people were killed and 18 wounded by two suicide bombings in the town of Kizlyar outside the offices of the local interior ministry and the FSB security agency. The second bomb went off twenty minutes after the first, as a crowd had gathered. In the early hours of the next morning two people died as a bomb went off in their car, apparently prematurely, near the village of Toturbiikala.
- On July 15, 2010, Pastor Artur Suleimanov, a Muslim convert to Christianity, was murdered by a gunman. The pastor was killed in his car as he was leaving the Hosanna House of Prayer in Makhachkala, Dagestan in the North Caucasus region, according to a religious persecution watchdog group, Voice of the Martyrs, report. Pastor Suleimanov's church is one of the largest Protestant churches in Dagestan. Christians in the Russian Republic of Dagestan, which borders Chechnya, face harassment and intimidation from various groups. Pastor Suleimanov's life had been threatened on several previous occasions.
- On September 23, 2011, Magomed Murtuzaliyev, a high-level law enforcement official, was shot and killed by gunmen.
- On September 28, 2011, 7 civilians and a police officer were killed by a car bomb in the village of Hajjalmakhi.
- On May 4, 2012, 12 people were killed in two separate explosions on the outskirts of Makhachkala, capital of Russia's Dagestan region.
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Famous quotes containing the word conflict:
“The white man regards the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction: individuals in it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths: personal power, success and fame are the absolute measures of values, the things to live for. This outlook on life divides the universe into a host of individual little entities which cannot help being in constant conflict thereby hastening the approach of the hour of their final destruction.”
—Policy statement, 1944, of the Youth League of the African National Congress. pt. 2, ch. 4, Fatima Meer, Higher than Hope (1988)