Caucasus

"If Russia tries to settle the Chechen problem by force, there will be a war in the Caucasus that will eclipse Afghanistan."Chechen leader Dzhokhar Dudayev, who used to pilot nuclear bombers, issued this warning before 40,000 Russian troops, aided by tanks and airplanes, moved to quell that Islamic mountain republic's rebellion. "A million and a half mujahadeen [holy warriors] will come to the Caucasus ready to become martyrs," he predicted.For months, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin tried to avoid open intervention in this pocket near Georgia and Azerbaijan, each of which have experienced bloody strife since gaining independence.

When Albina Digaeva, a Chechen who was granted political asylum in the United States, first learned that the Boston bombing suspects were from Chechnya, she called the California family who initially put her up when she arrived 15 years ago and apologized. A member of the host family that originally hailed from Boston "tried to calm me down and said I can't claim responsibility for the actions of two individuals," said Digaeva, who now lives in Los Angeles and doesn't know the two brothers suspected in the bombing.

VLADIKAVKAZ, Russia -- The helicopter gunships came back from the east, flying low and parallel to a stony range of mountains, a rampart of the Caucasus. They had run missions over Chechnya. Now, missile batteries empty, they carried the casualties of Russia's latest mountain war.The helicopters materialized out of a cold haze that hugged the steppe. They were the fearsomely skeletal creatures that the Russians call Crocodiles.Orderlies with stretchers ran to meet them. The orderlies brought their charges into the emergency medical station at the airport: young men, draftees.

It is not clear why the Obama administration and its allies in Congress decided to express their misplaced "concern" regarding Hungary's extradition of Lt. Ramil Safarov to his native Azerbaijan ("Ax murderer's homecoming stokes Caucasus feud," Sept. 7). It is not our place to tell two sovereign nations, which happen to be our allies, how they should carry out justice in their countries. After all, we keep Guantanamo Bay open, refuse to join the International Criminal Court and limit the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice at The Hague, among other things.

Moscow -- When Prometheus delivered mankind from ignorance and misery with the gift of fire, Zeus punished him by chaining him to a mountain, where an eagle preyed on his liver. According to Greek legend, that mountain was in the Caucasus.In the thousands of years since, the myths of the Caucasian Mountains have kept coming back to such themes: vengeance and cruelty, and heroism tragically brought low.Today, those themes seem to be playing themselves out once more in that thorny, bristling region.

NALCHIK, Russia -- It should have taken Ruslan Nakhushev no more than 10 minutes to walk from the security police headquarters, where he was summoned this month to be questioned, back to his office on Gorky Street, one of the main thoroughfares here in the capital of one of Russia's troubled southern republics. But he never returned to the office or to the three-room apartment he shared with his mother. Calls to his cell phone were met by an unfamiliar voice, a laugh, then the silence of a dead line.

MOSCOW -- Security forces freed all of the hostages held by Chechen rebels in the southern Russian city of Nalchik yesterday, a day after a series of coordinated attacks there left at least 108 people dead and renewed questions about government responses to the spreading violence in the Caucasus. Russian forces were said to have used an armored personnel carrier and grenades to recapture a police station, souvenir shop and federal prisons building where 18 hostages had been held since Thursday.

WASHINGTON - While crisis swirls in the Middle East and the Balkans, the Bush administration's first intensive diplomatic negotiations will be devoted to bringing peace to a troubled land in the Caucasus, countering Russian influence in a critical part of Asia - and helping the administration's friends in the oil industry. Tomorrow, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell will be in Key West, Fla., to begin five days of talks aimed at settling a dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Sponsored by the United States, France and Russia, the Key West conference will seek to resolve the status of Nagorno-Karabakh, a tiny mountain enclave that is historically part of Azerbaijan but is controlled by ethnic Armenian rebels.

MOSCOW -- Leo Tolstoy told the story best, 130 years ago. "It was a time of war in the Caucasus," he wrote. "The roads were not safe by night or day. If ever a Russian ventured to ride or walk any distance away from his fort, the Tartars killed him or carried him off to the hills. So it had been arranged that twice every week a body of soldiers should march from one fortress to the next to convoy travelers from point to point." The Russian writer called his short story "A Prisoner in the Caucasus" and told of two Russian officers seized as they rode home through the treacherous mountains.

It's infrequent enough that you can say the movie is better than the book, but it's a positive rarity when you can say it of a book not by John Grisham or Michael Crichton, but by Leo Tolstoy.Yet such feels like an absolute truth: Sergei Bodrov's "Prisoner of the Mountains," which opens Friday at the Charles and has just been nominated for an Academy Award, is in every way superior to the mid-19th-century text on which it is based, "The Prisoner of the Caucasus" by the then young cavalry officer who would later become one of the world's great novelists.

NALCHIK, Russia -- It should have taken Ruslan Nakhushev no more than 10 minutes to walk from the security police headquarters, where he was summoned this month to be questioned, back to his office on Gorky Street, one of the main thoroughfares here in the capital of one of Russia's troubled southern republics. But he never returned to the office or to the three-room apartment he shared with his mother. Calls to his cell phone were met by an unfamiliar voice, a laugh, then the silence of a dead line.

MOSCOW -- Security forces freed all of the hostages held by Chechen rebels in the southern Russian city of Nalchik yesterday, a day after a series of coordinated attacks there left at least 108 people dead and renewed questions about government responses to the spreading violence in the Caucasus. Russian forces were said to have used an armored personnel carrier and grenades to recapture a police station, souvenir shop and federal prisons building where 18 hostages had been held since Thursday.

NALCHIK, Russia - Dzhamed Tsakoyev knelt on the carpet and laid the paperwork out like tarot cards, as if shuffling medical and police reports might make sense of his son's brutal death. Last year, police in the southern Russian republic of Kabardino-Balkaria arrested Tsakoyev's son, Rasul, a cell phone dealer who was also a devout Muslim. Rasul Tsakoyev's captors allegedly shocked him with electric wires, put cigarettes out on his skin and beat him unconscious. They left him for dead on a trash heap.

BESLAN, Russia - Russia's war in the Caucasus is a military campaign as well as a clash of cultures and an ancient ethnic struggle. In this farm town, on the plains at the foot of the Caucasus, it is now also a family affair. Hundreds of people - mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles - surrounded Middle School No. 1 yesterday, where about 20 guerrillas continued to hold hundreds of hostages, most of them schoolchildren. Relatives gathered on the lawns of the town's pink Palace of Culture like people on a grim picnic.

RUSSIA'S AGONY continues. Planes downed; a suicide bomber in Moscow; now, an entire school taken hostage in the Caucasus. Officials say they expect more soon. The Russian government says it is the victim of international terrorism, and it's partly right. But if it weren't for the Kremlin's brutal and indiscriminate policies in Muslim Chechnya over the past decade, jihadist organizations never would have gotten a foothold in Europe's eastern reaches. The war in Chechnya began as a war of secession by a contentious mountain republic that had become a haven for organized criminal gangs whose specialties included extortion and kidnapping.

STUDDED WITH screws and ball bearings, the Victory Day bomb that obliterated a marine band in the southern Russian republic of Dagestan was noteworthy for the level of anguish it caused but not for the anguish itself. Anguish isn't news in that part of the world. Thursday's explosion was just another wrenching moment in the bitter story of the Caucasus. The remote-controlled bomb killed 41 in all, at least 13 of them children who had turned out to watch a parade celebrating a long-ago triumph of Russian arms, the vanquishing of Nazi Germany.

When Albina Digaeva, a Chechen who was granted political asylum in the United States, first learned that the Boston bombing suspects were from Chechnya, she called the California family who initially put her up when she arrived 15 years ago and apologized. A member of the host family that originally hailed from Boston "tried to calm me down and said I can't claim responsibility for the actions of two individuals," said Digaeva, who now lives in Los Angeles and doesn't know the two brothers suspected in the bombing.

It's amazing how computers replicate the human mind. Intel even developed a chip that errs in balancing a checkbook.The gummint doesn't know whether to catch Unabomber, or turn him against the Enemy.An immense number of nationalities live in the confined Caucasus mountains. The Appalachians cover a lot more ground and contain only three or four.Fashion is illusion. The French designer Alix Gres did not let anyone know she had died until a year after she did it.

The decision to send American soldiers to Georgia, ostensibly to help President Eduard A. Shevardnadze's government in its struggle with terrorism, is provocative, risky and wrong-headed. Worse, it's being presented by all sides as something that it's not. The stated goal is to train Georgian soldiers so they can fight "tens" of terrorist al-Qaida fighters in the Pankisi Gorge, which abuts Russia's breakaway republic of Chechnya. But Georgia doesn't care about Pankisi -- it cares about its own secessionists on the other side of the country.

BAKU, Azerbaijan - Ali Khan Shirvanshir, a Baku high school student, an Asian and a Muslim, loves Nino Kipiani, a Westerner, a Georgian Christian - and the most beautiful girl in the world. So the story begins, with its themes of East and West, Islam and Christianity and two young people in love as war and wrenching change approach. It is the story of Ali and Nino, set in the Caucasus just before the Russian Revolution. The novel, written by Kurban Said, was first published in 1937 in German.