Kadyrov drove to her rescue with 150 men, about eight of whom forced their way into the police station. There, they aimed their guns at several officers, shoving them and punching them in the stomachs with their rifle butts, before departing with Kadyrova. Dagestan prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into the case.
Dagestan's interior minister, Adilgerey Magomedtagirov, has survived two assassination attempts and on Dec. 30 buried one of his senior lieutenants, Col. Gadzhiramazan Ramazanov, chief of the operational department.
Yet he enthusiastically endorses Moscow's line that the insurgents are mere bandits who can be rounded up and put out of business with enough good police work. The same official line has held that the number of Chechen insurgents has remained constant at about 1,500 for the last several years, though dozens are reported killed every month.
"It's only a matter of time before they are all apprehended," Magomedtagirov said in an interview. "Of course, as long as these people continue to run into the woods, these conflicts are bound to continue. Because as a rule, they don't surrender. But I can tell you that, sooner or later, we'll get to every single one of them and hold them to account."
Critics doubt it.
"This process of new people running to the mountains is quite explicable. People do this because they do not know how to protect themselves from the arbitrary rule of the current authorities," said Tatyana Kasatkina, executive director of Memorial, a human rights center in Moscow.
"People get summarily rounded up in mop-up operations, they are tortured, and very often their dead bodies are discovered, or they simply vanish without a trace," she said. "And no appeals to the prosecutor bodies or other law-enforcement bodies yield any results. It is all too obvious why some people prefer to hide in the mountains and correct the wrong the best way they know how -- with weapons in their hands."
The incident on Magistralnaya Street started when police got word that several insurgents were operating a safe house just down the street, purportedly under the direction of the "emir" of the Jennet (Paradise) Islamic cell in Dagestan, Ruslan Makasharipov.
Makasharipov, 33, is a former translator for Basayev and Saudi-born militant Khattab, who operated training camps for extremists in Chechnya before dying of poisoning in 2002 -- allegedly after receiving a letter from Russian agents.
