His sister, Berliant Magomedova, 35, said citizens did not support the insurgents but were fed up with the police.
"Who can say the situation is getting better?" she asked. "The cops get killed by the dozen on a regular basis. If they had been doing their jobs, they wouldn't have allowed those terrorists to enter our house."
Jasmina Dzamalova's 6-year-old daughter was inadvertently left inside the building with the militants until her husband went back in during the standoff and won the girl's release.
"It is a war going on, I can tell you that," the 28-year-old literature teacher said. "It is dangerous to live here. We're afraid all the time. You send your kids to school, and you wonder, are they going to come back? You go to the market, and you're afraid, because you don't know which market they're going to use as a target next.
"God forbid," she added, "that any mother should have to go through what I went through that day."
But it was just one of many violent confrontations in the region. On the same day as the siege on Magistralnaya Street, several special forces officers were dispatched to a house in a suburban town just outside of Makhachkala. But before they could burst through the front door, the suspected militant, 51-year-old Magomedzagir Akaev, opened fire.
The commander of the unit and two officers died along with Akaev.
Twelve days later, there was a six-hour battle between police and militants in Nalchik. It left seven insurgents dead and nearly 20 apartments destroyed or damaged. Authorities quickly brought in repair crews, getting most families back into their homes within three weeks.
Then, back in Dagestan on Feb. 2, the republic's deputy interior minister and three of his bodyguards were killed on the main street of Makhachkala by unknown gunmen who blocked the path of their car and opened fire.
On the same day, the administrator of Dagestan's Khasav-Yurt district was saved from a roadside bomb by the armor plating in his Mercedes limo.
Chechen officials are as capable of spreading mayhem as the insurgents. This was illustrated Jan. 10, when police in Dagestan stopped the car of a Chechen woman, Zulai Kadyrova, and two of her bodyguards. The car and its occupants had no proper documents, police said, but it turned out that Kadyrova was the sister of Chechnya's deputy prime minister and presidential security force leader, Ramzan Kadyrov.
