Excerpt from report by Radio Russia on 3 March
[Presenter] A special operation is being conducted in Chechnya's Nozhay-Yurtovskiy District to eliminate an armed group, which, according to some reports, is headed by [Chechen separatist leader] Aslan Maskhadov himself. On Thursday [3 March] Aleksandr Gamov, a correspondent for the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, returned from a trip to the area of the military operation and told our correspondent what he had seen.
[Gamov] Literally on the day following the end of the so-called moratorium on military actions announced by Maskhadov, a detachment of fighters was spotted in this region of Chechnya and the group's base was located. According to the organizers of the operation to catch the group, separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov is among the fighters.
The operation is being conducted with almost no involvement by the federal forces. It involves approximately 2,000 members of the Chechen OMON [special purpose police] and three local Interior Ministry regiments.
It seemed that this was the first time the Chechen forces had conducted an operation on this scale on their own. I spoke to many of the soldiers and, according to them, approximately 40 per cent of those trying to catch and eliminate the group were themselves former fighters, i.e. people who under the direct guarantee that offered by Akhmad Kadyrov, the [late] Chechen President, and supported by President Putin changed to side with the legal authorities.
The Chechen OMON and Interior Ministry officers are not following any rules. They simply drew up the model for conducting the special operation on the map: it is a square 60 by 60 [presumably kilometres] with several hundred checkpoints on its perimeter. There was very thick fog and heavy snow. They said that the group was made up of something like 70 bandits, some said there were 100.
The bandits use guerrilla tactics, so those trying to find and catch them used anti-guerrilla tactics, i.e. several special search groups were operating inside the square in which the bandits were trapped. This is a new approach.
The fact that this operation is almost entirely being conducted by divisions of the Chechen Interior Ministry also has its disadvantages. For example, as the first deputy prime minister of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, told us, the operation is being hampered not just by the fog and heavy snow, but by the fact that the Chechen Interior Ministry has no helicopters.
Ramzan Kadyrov said that incidents had occurred when the Chechen OMON and police officers have seen the fighters and can literally count the individual fighters, but in order to reach them on foot it would take 5 or 6 hours and by that time it would be dark. They say to the federal troops: "Send us a helicopter so we can drop our guys on the area where the fighters are concentrated, it would only take 10 minutes, or send in your group and catch them." But Ramzan Kadyrov said that in one case they waited for five hours but no helicopter arrived and no explanation was offered for this. [Passage omitted]
Source: Radio Russia, Moscow, in Russian 2100 gmt 3 Mar 05
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