Dagestan

A shootout with Islamic militants at a police station left 14 Russian troops dead Monday, even as residents of the southern republic of Dagestan became increasingly angry that federal forces have failed to oust the rebels despite a month of fighting. The militants, seeking an independent Islamic state, have battled Russian troops since seizing several villages in Dagestan on Aug. 7. Government troops responded with air and ground attacks, pushing the rebels out of some areas.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin met Saturday with a Muslim leader to seek ways to defuse the situation in the republic of Dagestan, where Russian forces are fighting Muslim insurgents. Putin, a former KGB spy whose appointment was approved by parliament Monday, discussed the Dagestani conflict with Ravil Gainutdin, a leader of Russia's Muslim Council of Muftis, a spokesman said.

With a watermelon under his arm and a broad smile on his face, Shamil Basayev looks for a moment like a man at a picnic, not a warrior, a hostage-taker, a terrorist. But the video snippet that plays repeatedly on national television is deeply unsettling to Russian viewers.

Amid signs that fighting in the Russian republic of Dagestan has spread into neighboring Chechnya, military officials for the first time acknowledged Thursday that they face serious problems in their bid to control a guerrilla rebellion in Dagestan, a troubled southern region. Russian planes continued rocket and bomb attacks in the area of seven Dagestani villages seized by Islamic militants who invaded from nearby Chechnya last weekend.

An explosion destroyed a five-story apartment building housing military officers in southern Russia late Saturday, killing at least seven people, according to news reports. Rescue workers pulled 77 injured people from the rubble today, but at least 80 residents were still feared buried. There was no word on the cause of the explosion in the town of Buynaksk, in the North Caucasus republic of Dagestan.

Islamic rebels in southern Russia reopened their war for independence Sunday by launching a new incursion into the republic of Dagestan just hours after a car bomb exploded in a military housing block there, killing at least 33 people. Russian officials said the incursion and the car bomb were "links in the same chain," demonstrating that despite Russian declarations of victory two weeks ago, religious and political unrest continues unabated in the Caucasus region.

MOSCOW -- Twin explosions rocked the capital of Dagestan on Monday, killing four people and injuring dozens in the Russian region most recently known for its association with the Boston Marathon bombing suspects. A car bomb detonated in the center of Makhachkala, the Itar-Tass news agency reported. As police rushed to the scene, another, more powerful bomb detonated in their midst, said Rasul Temirbekov, head of the Dagestan Investigative Committee. He said the force of the explosion was possibly equal to more than 100 pounds of TNT. Thirty-five of the 40 or so injured people were hospitalized.

An outbreak of cholera in the Russian republic of Dagestan in the Caucasus has claimed its first victims, the Health Ministry reported Tuesday. Six people have died and 204 have cholera, the ministry said.

Eight Russian soldiers were killed and 20 wounded Wednesday as Russian forces battled Islamic militants for control of a rebel-occupied village in the southern republic of Dagestan. It was the Russian forces' heaviest one-day death toll yet in the 12-day conflict in the Caucasus Mountains. The village, called Tando, was one of the first settlements the rebels occupied when they invaded several Dagestani towns Aug. 7 in their quest to create an independent Islamic state.

According to legend, when Allah was distributing the world's languages like corn from a sack, he stumbled on the mountains and spilled the seeds of 32 local tongues in an area of 19,300 square miles between Georgia and Azerbaijan. This is now the small, autonomous Soviet republic of Dagestan, where more than 60 ethnic groups live and which local Communist Party officials call a "laboratory of national relations."