Chechen Rebels Show Russia It’s Not in Control

After weeks of lying low, rebels in Chechnya struck back powerfully against Russian forces, unleashing a deadly series of coordinated truck bombings that killed at least 37 Russian servicemen and shook Russia’s confidence that it has regained control of the breakaway republic.

The five suicide attacks late Sunday--all aimed at military command posts, checkpoints and barracks--forcefully demonstrated that Chechen rebels retain far more firepower and serve under a far more unified command than Russian officials acknowledge.

The most deadly bomb killed at least 26 elite OMON police troops as they slept in their barracks in the town of Argun, just a few miles east of the Chechen capital, Grozny. Television footage showed simple metal bunks standing amid crumbled brick and concrete, and emergency workers lifting black body bags one after another into idling transport trucks.

In a gesture of mourning, comrades of the dead servicemen fired their automatic rifles into the air, slowly and angrily emptying their ammunition clips.

“Our job now is to seek them out and destroy them,” said Col. Gen. Gennady Troshev, commander of Russia’s forces in Chechnya, his usual bravado noticeably dampened. “No talks are possible. You see the way things are going.”

The Interfax news agency, citing a videotape circulating in Chechnya, said Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov--the nominal leader of Chechnya’s fractious and powerful warlords--claimed responsibility.

“These are not Arabs or mercenaries,” Maskhadov said on the video, according to Interfax. “These are desperate Chechens who are paying [the Russians] back for their near and dear ones. These are people who have decided to leave the world of evil and violence for the world of the righteous.”

The Kremlin’s war spokesman, Sergei V. Yastrzhembsky, said that at least 37 Russian troops were killed and 74 injured. The rebels’ official Web site (https://www.kavkaz.org) claimed the bombers had taken the lives of 490 Russian servicemen. It did not say how many bombers died in the attacks. Each side routinely exaggerates the other’s losses and undercounts its own.

The bombings appeared to rattle Russian leaders. In contrast to previous events, they said little about the bombings. Yastrzhembsky, who usually holds a daily press briefing, instead simply called half a dozen favored reporters into his private office.

He said President Vladimir V. Putin expressed condolences to the families of the victims, but the president said nothing about the bombings in any of his public appearances. The Kremlin press office later said it had no statement of consolation to release.

The lack of information was so noticeable that even reporters for the state television network resorted to citing unofficial sources.

“This series of bombs once again demonstrates that the rebels are quite well organized, quite capable of coordinating their efforts, and that the war is far from being over--contrary to what Gen. Troshev hurried to declare last week,” said military analyst Alexander I. Zhilin. “It also shows that the Russian military isn’t in control of the situation when a truck driven loaded with explosives can roam Chechnya from remote corners to the streets and squares of seemingly peaceful towns.

“I fear Russia has entered a period of permanent instability in Chechnya, with terrorist acts possible anywhere at any time,” he added. “The Defense Ministry will have a hard time explaining all this to the mass media.”

In recent weeks, Russian officials have repeatedly claimed that the rebels were dispersed and defeated, hiding in remote mountain camps and operating in disjointed bands of a dozen or so.

But the attacks, in which the same kind of truck loaded with the same kind of explosives went off at more or less the same time, suggested effective coordination.

In Argun, a Ural truck carrying about a ton of dynamite and plastic explosives crashed through a fence about 8 p.m. Sunday and exploded just a few feet from the building where OMON troops from the Chelyabinsk region were bunked. It blasted a hole in the ground more than 15 feet deep and 30 feet across. Bits of the truck engine and the bomber’s body were spread over hundreds of yards.

Details of the other blasts were scarce, but Yastrzhembsky described them as having “the same signature, the same style.” He said two Ural trucks exploded in the city of Gudermes and one each in the towns of Urus-Martan and Novogroznensky. Two servicemen died in both Gudermes and Urus-Martan, and three died in Novogroznensky. Yastrzhembsky described the death toll as preliminary and likely to change as rescue workers retrieve more bodies.

Russian forces responded to the attacks by sealing off the towns and conducting zachistki operations--a word that can be translated as “sweeps” or “purges”--in which soldiers comb through neighborhoods looking for rebel hide-outs. Evidence collected by journalists and human rights workers after earlier sweeps suggests that it is during such operations that some Russian troops have committed atrocities such as rape and summary executions.

Troshev said that Russian intelligence had reported Sunday that a series of attacks was likely and that stricter security measures were imposed. Troshev said that without those measures, the death toll would probably have been far higher.

Russia’s first war against Chechen separatists ended in 1996 with an uneasy cease-fire. Russia went to war against the separatists a second time in September after the rebels launched an incursion into the neighboring region of Dagestan and a series of bombings struck four apartment houses in Moscow and other cities, killing 300 people.

In 10 months of fighting, Russia has reclaimed most of Chechen territory but has been unable to rout the rebels from mountain hide-outs or prevent increasingly bold hit-and-run attacks by the guerrillas. By official count, more than 2,300 Russian servicemen have lost their lives in the war so far; some unofficial counts are double that figure.

This week’s truck bombings were noticeably different in method and style from last year’s apartment house attacks--a fact likely to be seized upon by those who suspect Chechen terrorists were not to blame for the apartment bombs. The earlier bombs hit ordinary apartment houses, not military targets, and their victims were civilians, not soldiers. And no one claimed public responsibility--in fact, Chechen leaders denied any connection.

By contrast, Chechen spokesman Movladi Udugov boasted to the Reuters news agency Monday that the truck bombs had left the towns “strewn with Russian corpses.”

“The Russian aggressors are in a state of panic,” Udugov said. “This is the start of the first phase of our large-scale operation to free Chechen villages and destroy the Russian aggressors. We have two Chechen battalions of suicide bombers--500 people--who are ready to die for Islam.”

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Sergei L. Loiko of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.