Paul
Goble
Staunton, February 2 – The Kremlin
claims and all too many in Russia and the West accept that the central
government has won in the North Caucasus, but a new report, which finds that
the number of victims of the conflict there rose by 11 percent last year over
the year before, makes it clear that such claims and their acceptance are not
justified.
The Kavkaz-Uzel portal which tracks
developments in that region publishes today a summary of the information it has
gathered on combat losses and violence there over the last year compared to the
year before, acknowledging that its numbers likely understate the level of
violence because they are almost certainly incomplete (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/297004/).
According to the
portal, the number of killed and wounded in the armed conflict in the North
Caucasus rose from 258 in 2015 to 287 in 2016. The number of explosions rose
significantly as well from 11 to 26, but the number of “armed incidents” the
authorities reported remained unchanged at 86.
The number of those who died in these
clashes fell slightly from 209 to 185, while the number of wounded increased
from 49 to 62. The civilian population suffered somewhat less in 2016 than in
2015: the number of killed and wounded among it across the region fell by 31
percent, from 35 to 24.
But combat losses among the Russian
force structures “almost doubled,” Kavkaz-Uzel reports. In 2015, these
structures suffered 18 killed and 31 wounded; in 2016, those numbers rose to 32
and 65 respectively. And the number of
killed and wounded among the militants also rose from 147 to 166, with 162 of
those killed rather than wounded.
The portal notes that there are
important variations within the region as a whole. Daghestan, Chechnya, and
Kabardino-Balkaria all saw the number of killed and wounded go up; Ingushetia
and Stavropol saw declines; and Karachayevo-Cherkessia and North Ossetia, this
past year as in 2015, had no clashes and no losses.
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