MOSCOW - From the start of the Russian hostage crisis, the Kremlin has insisted that the Chechen guerrillas who seized more than 750 people in a Moscow theater were agents of international terror groups.
Yet, a week after 50 Chechen raiders infiltrated the theater and days after a Russian military assault brought the incident to a violent close, government officials have offered no evidence to support their assertions of foreign backing for the hostage-takers.
Those claims, it seems, were part of Russia's effort to cast the war in Chechnya as a fight against Islamic extremists rather than as a bid to crush a separatist rebellion in the Caucasus.
But analysts outside of Russia's government, as well as many Chechens, say there is foreign support for the Chechen rebellion - even if not as extensive as the Kremlin contends.
"Islamic organizations have given the Chechens big assistance," said Alexei Malashenko, an expert on Chechnya at the Carnegie Moscow Center. "These ties exist but they should not be exaggerated, because the roots of the Chechen conflict, the roots of the hostage crisis, reside in Chechnya itself."
It is still not clear who planned and organized the hostage-taking in the heart of Moscow, an incident that led to the deaths of at least 170 people. But the Kremlin is using the episode to justify its policy of refusing to negotiate with Chechen resistance figures. And Russian officials point to the alleged foreign sponsorship of the hostage-taking as the basis for a more aggressive military posture abroad.
Col. Ilya Shabalkin, an official of the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB, stationed in Chechnya, described the war as a struggle against the forces that launched last year's attacks against New York and Washington.
"The threat to the Russian Federation, the threat to the United States and the threat to Europe is coming from a quite formal organization of Islamic terrorism," Shabalkin said last week in a heavily guarded military barracks in the Chechen capital of Grozny. "They are brothers in the Muslim world."
Shabalkin, whose comments came two days before the hostage-taking, said about 200 of the estimated 1,200 separatist fighters in Chechnya were foreigners, mostly Arabs from Persian Gulf states or Turks.
