Feb 8 (Reuters) - Doku Umarov, the leader of Russia's Islamist insurgency, said he ordered a suicide bombing that killed 36 people at Russia's busiest airport last month. He has vowed "blood and tears" in Russia if it refuses to abandon its mostly Muslim North Caucasus territories.
Umarov, one of the last surviving original leaders of the Chechen rebellion that began in the early 1990s, is Russia's most wanted man and was placed on the U.S. State Department's list of terrorists last year.
GOALS:
-- In 2007, Umarov adopted the title "Emir of the Caucasus Emirate" and dramatically shifted his ideology from a nationalist separatist movement to that of jihad (holy war).
He also expanded his territorial claim beyond Chechnya, asserting authority for his rebel group, the Caucasus Emirate, over the mostly Muslim republics of Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachay-Cherkessia as well as mostly Christian Ossetia and parts of neighboring provinces.
Russia's North Caucasus, a region of mountains and steppe on the country's southern border, has a history of ethnic and clan feuding and rebellion against Russian rule since Tsarist times.
-- Umarov rose to prominence as the Chechen rebellion, which began essentially as an ethnic nationalist uprising, assumed a more strongly Islamist character with the second war that started in 1999.
He took over as insurgent leader when his predecessor Khalim Saydullayev was killed by Russian forces in 2006.
-- Umarov has declared the goals of the Caucasus jihadis to be twofold: to expel non-Muslims and implement sharia law, and to expand the jihad beyond the Caucasus.
Half of Russia's 20 million Muslims live out of the North Caucasus, in the oil and petrochemicals producing Tatarstan and Bashkortostan regions.
METHODS
-- Umarov vowed last year to take the war to Russian cities outside the North Caucasus and hit economic targets, which could include oil pipelines.
-- Umarov's group has claimed responsibility for a series of attacks in the Russian heartland in recent years, including twin suicide blasts that killed 40 people on the Moscow metro in March 2010 and the bombing of a train between Moscow and St Petersburg that killed 26 people in November 2009.
The Caucasus Emirate also claimed responsibility for a suicide bomb attack in June which left the leader of Ingushetia, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, fighting for his life in June 2009 and a Siberian dam disaster that killed 75 that August. Russian authorities blamed it on a technical failure.
INFIGHTING
-- Umarov's authority over the insurgents was questioned after an Internet video in August showed him saying he was stepping down due to health reasons. He appointed a successor, Hussein Gakayev, but then reversed the decision. Analysts say Umarov is still jostling for power.
ORIGINS
-- Umarov was born in April 1964 in the village of Kharsenoi in southern Chechnya and graduated from the construction faculty of the Oil Institute in its caital, Grozny. He fought in both Chechen wars in the 1990s against Russian security forces.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND:
-- The rebellion by Chechens inhabiting the northern slopes of the Caucasus mountains began in the 1990s as a largely ethnic nationalist movement, fired by a sense of injustice over the transportation of Chechens to Central Asia, with enormous loss of life, by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in the 1940s.
Chechnya declared independence from Russia in 1991 as the Soviet Union collapsed, and there have been two bloody wars with Russian federal forces since 1994. Officially, Russia ended its "counter-terrorism operation" in Chechnya in April 2009.
-- Russian leaders declared victory in their battle with the Chechen separatists who fought two wars with Moscow. While violence subsided in Chechnya, it spread and intensified in neighbouring Dagestan and Ingushetia, where clan rivalries overlap with criminal gangs and Islamist militancy.
-- Russian and pro-Moscow Chechen politicians said that many commanders in the region had been killed by 2007 and the losses had broken the back of the resistance, reducing its strength to a few hundred men. Resistance websites and recent attacks, however, tell a different story.
Sources: Reuters/jamestown Foundation/http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives [http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives]. Kavkaz Center: kavkazcenter.com
For an analysis of Umarov's claim of responsibility fior the airport bombing, please see [ID:nLDE7170W2]
(Writing by David Cutler and Amie Ferris-Rotman, Editorial Reference Unit in London; Editing by Michael Roddy)
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