Early Militant Activities
In August 2004 Yarmuk announced the beginning of military operations in the republic. Their online manifesto rejected terrorism, referring to alleged government responsibility for the 1999 Russian apartment bombings ("We are not fighting against women or children, like Russian invaders are doing in Ichkeria. We are not blowing up sleeping people, like FSB of the Russian Federation does"). The manifesto noted the corruption of the "mafia clans" that led the republic ("These mere apologies for rulers, who sold themselves to the invaders, have made drug addiction, prostitution, poverty, crime, depravity, drunkenness and unemployment prosper in our Republic").
Yarmuk launched its first attack in Kabardino-Balkaria that same month, ambushing policemen in Chegem district. A turning point came in December 2004, when Yarmuk members conducted a raid on the office of the federal drug control agency in Nalchik, during which they seized large quantities of weapons and ammunition. The founding leader of Yarmuk, Muslim Atayev, was killed when the police stormed an apartment in Nalchik in January 2005. The organization continued to operate, staging attacks under the leadership of his successor, Rustam Bekanov. He was killed three months later and was replaced by Anzor Astemirov, a former deputy director of the Islamic Center. The group's base of operations was Nalchik and the Balkarian enclave around Mount Elbrus.
Read more about this topic: Yarmuk Jamaat
Famous quotes containing the words early, militant and/or activities:
“It is easy to see that, even in the freedom of early youth, an American girl never quite loses control of herself; she enjoys all permitted pleasures without losing her head about any of them, and her reason never lets the reins go, though it may often seem to let them flap.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
““I” is a militant social tendency, working to hold and enlarge its place in the general current of tendencies. So far as it can it waxes, as all life does. To think of it as apart from society is a palpable absurdity of which no one could be guilty who really saw it as a fact of life.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)
“The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)