Invasion of Dagestan (1999) - Aftermath

Aftermath

Russia followed up with a bombing campaign of southeastern Chechnya; on September 23, Russian fighter jets bombed targets in and around the Chechen capital Grozny. Aslan Maskhadov, the separatist president of Chechnya, opposed the invasion of Dagestan, and offered a crackdown on the renegade warlords. It was refused by the Kremlin and on October 1999, after a string of four apartment bombings, Russian ground forces invaded Chechnya, starting the Second Chechen War. Since then, Dagestan has been a site of an ongoing, low-level insurgency by a number of armed Islamist groups (such as Shariat Jamaat) which has claimed the lives of hundreds of people, mostly civilians.

The invasion of Dagestan caused the displacement of 32,000 Dagestani civilians. According to researcher Robert Bruce Ware, Basayev and Khattab's invasions were potentially genocidal in that they attacked mountain villages destroying entire populations of small ethno-linguistic groups. Furthermore, Ware asserts that the invasions are properly described as terrorist attacks because they initially involved attacks against Dagestani civilians and police officers.