Kizlyar raid

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kizlyar hospital hostage crisis
Location	Republic of Dagestan (Russian Federation)
Target(s)	Kizlyar hospital
Date	January 9 - January 10, 1996
Attack Type	Hostage crisis
Perpetrator(s)	Chechen rebels under Hunkarpasha Israpilov
Motive	Securing safe passage to Chechnya using the human shields tactic

The Kizlyar raid was a military offensive followed by a large-scale hostage taking by the Chechen separatists in January 1996 during the First Chechen War against Russia. The raid culminated in a week-long fierce battle for the border village of Pervomayskoye.

Contents 1 Kizlyar attack and hostage crisis 2 Siege of Pervomaiskoye 2.1 Breakout 3 Related hostage crises 4 Casaulties 5 Aftermath 6 See also 7 Notes section 8 External links

[edit] Kizlyar attack and hostage crisis

Kizlyar attack
Part of First Chechen War
Date January 9, 1996 Location Kizlyar airbase, Dagestan Result Light damage to the military base, Chechen attack stopped
Combatants
Russian Federation (Kizlyar garrison)	Chechen Republic of Ichkeria (Lone Wolf group)
Commanders
N/A	Salman Raduyev
Strength
N/A	200-300

On January 9, 1996 allegedly on Dzhokhar Dudayev's order, Salman Raduyev's "Lone Wolf" group launched a copycat raid of the Budyonnovsk hospital hostage crisis on the helicopter military airfield and later a civilian hospital in Kizlyar, Dagestan.

A field commander Hunkarpasha Israpilov later said that he took over command of the operation from Raduyev after the latter failed in his mission to destroy the airbase.^[1]

Rebel fighters led by Raduyev destroyed several helicopters at the Kizlyar military base and then entered the town, where they took some 1,500 to 3,000 hostages at a local hospital. All but about 120 were released after a day, but the rebels were using the remaining hostages as a human shields in an attempt to go back to Chechnya.

[edit] Siege of Pervomaiskoye

Battle of Pervomaiskoye
Part of First Chechen War
Date January 10 - January 18, 1996 Location Pervomayskoye and Sovetskoye, Dagestan Result Destruction of Pervomayskoye, Chechen escape
Combatants
Russian Ground Forces FSB and MVD (OSNAZ) Militsiya (OMON)	Lone Wolf group Relief force
Commanders
Mikhail Barsukov	Salman Raduyev Hunkarpasha Israpilov Maksud Ingulbayev
Strength
More than 2,400 (many special forces) Heavy weapons	Initially at least 200 Eventually at least 400
Casualties
N/A (17 captured and evacuated)	N/A (11 wounded and captured)

The rebels then headed in the direction of Chechnya but were halted near the border with Chechnya when Russian helicopter gunships fired on their convoy of 11 buses and two trucks on the border. A group of Novosibirsk OMON policemen who escorted the convoy and were caught in a crossfire surrendered to the rebels. The Chechens rushed for cover with the hostages to the nearby village of Pervomayskoye (Pervomaiskoye) and entrenched themselves.

Some hostages were reportedly given weapons by Chechens. Russian President Boris Yeltsin spoke on national TV on details of the operation. He said that, according to his information, "38 snipers" were supposed to keep the terrorists in their sights while a smoke screen would be created for hostages to run away through.

Russian special forces tried for three days to break into the village. After failing to do so, then Interior Minister Anatoly Kulikov and then Federal Security Service (FSB) Director Mikhail Barsukov, declaring that Raduyev's men had executed all of the hostages, ordered that the Russian forces open fire on the village with multiple rocket launchers. Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin also said that no hostages remained alive. Nevertheless, hostages were still alive and appealing desperately to the Russian security forces to cease firing on the village.

During the days when the Russian troops stormed Pervomaiskoye a large crowd of people, the relatives of the hostages, gathered near checkpoints located 10 kilometers from the settlement, as Dagestani police did not allow them to come nearer to the site. The people stood in silence and watched how the Russian troops bombarded the settlement where their relatives were supposedly being held.

Russian authorities have sought to minimize coverage of the crisis by keeping correspondents kilometers away from the scene, confiscating equipment, and using guard dogs and warning shots on some reporters. [1]

[edit] Breakout

On the eighth night, despite Interior Minister Kulikov's assurances that three rings of security forces had surrounded the village, Raduyev and his men managed to break out of the encirclement and escape, taking with them between about 20 Russian police hostages and some civilians. In the ensuing pursuit, many of the rebels and some hostages were killed by strafing attacks from Mi-24 helicopters.

At the same time, another 200 to 300 guerrillas, sent by Dudayev, crossed the border from Chechnya. They attacked the Russian lines from behind and then briefly took over a schoolhouse in the neighboring village of Sovetskoye, just a few kilometers outside Pervomayskaya, in a diversionary attack to aid in the breakthrough. (The relief column, like Salman Raduyev's detachment earlier this month, apparently made its way through Russian-patrolled areas of Chechnya and Dagestan. Russian military and law-enforcement officials accused the residents of two villages near Pervomaiskoye of having colluded with the relief force.)

According to former hostage Andrei Stepanenko, the majority of the Chechen fighters had escaped from encirclement early morning of January 18, with a number of wounded fighters being carried on stretchers, while some 20 seriously injured who could not be transported were left behind. They also took with them a large amount of weapons and ammunition, including captured BM-21 Grad rocket launcher trucks.

Russian forces finally captured a pulverized village full of the corpses of Chechen fighters, Dagestani civilians, and Russian soldiers. About 80 of the Kizlyar hostages were recovered alive. When the fighting was over, one Russian regular army soldier unintentionally fired his armored personnel carrier's cannon; the shell hit and blew up another armored vehicle, and its fragments landed on the elite Alpha Group team, killing two commandos and injuring three. [2]

On January 19 Salman Raduyev proposed to exchange the police hostages for the seriously wounded fighters he had left behind. The Chechens announced their readiness to turn over remaining civilian hostages to Dagestani authorities.

[edit] Related hostage crises

Turkish authorities meanwhile coped effectively with the hijackers of the ferryboat Avrazya, captured January 16 by an armed group thought to number about a dozen Turkish citizens of Caucasian origin in support of the rebels besieged at Pervomaiskoye. Turkish authorities, in constant communication and negotiation with the captors, secured safe release of the captives (150 mostly Russian passengers and a Turkish crew) unharmed, and surrender of the gunmen without bloodshed.

In Chechnya's capital Grozny approximately 30 Russian employees of a power plant were kindapped in January 17. It was also reported that some 38 civilians, mostly Russian, had been kidnapped previous week in Chechnya's rebel-controlled Achkhoy-Martanovsky District and offered in exchange for Chechen fighters in Russian captivity and civilian Chechen inmates of Russian filtration camps. Their release was negotiated later this month. [3]

[edit] Casaulties

Raduyev's later indictment said 37 Russian soldiers and police officers as well as 41 civilians were killed during the raid.

Independent analysts estimated overall casualties at 96 Chechen fighters killed, 26 hostages killed, and about 200 Russian military killed or wounded. [4] The full extent of civilian casualties remained unknown because the Russian army did not permit journalists and independent observers access to the village during the attack and until after dead bodies of civilians were reportedly cleared from the streets by soldiers. [5]

On January 27, 1996, 26 Chechen fighters, whose bodies were returned by Russian authorities through Dagestani intermediaries, were buried in the Tsotsin-Yurt village cemetery, considered a holy place because it holds the bodies of 400 Chechens killed fighting Russian forces in 1919. [6]

[edit] Aftermath

Russian press accounts of the carnage (including those by Izvestiya corespondent Valery Yakov, who witnessed the fighting from inside Pervomaiskoye) described a chaotic, overmanned, and bungled Russian operation in Pervomaiskoye. Reports depicted an operation marked by great cruelty toward hostages and other civilians carried out by hungry, freezing, and drunken soldiers with old, malfunctioning equipment. FSB Director Mikhail Barsukov, who commanded the Pervomaiskoye operation, was derided by journalists at a Moscow briefing on January 21 when he provided the latest casualty numbers. The international organization Reporters without Borders publicly protested Russian security authorities' intimidation of the press at Pervomaiskoye and the Russian military authorities' ban on medical assistance to civilians and their refusal to allow evacuation of the wounded.^[2]

Eleven captured guerrillas were granted amnesty by a special resolution of the Russian State Duma in exchange for 17 Novosibirsk policemen captured in Pervomaiskoye. [7]

Captured during the Second Chechen War, Salman Raduyev was sentenced to life in prison in 2001. He died in prison colony in 2002.

[edit] See also

• Budyonnovsk hospital hostage crisis
• Moscow theatre hostage crisis
• Beslan school hostage crisis

[edit] Notes section

1. ^ Peer Criticises Performance of Chechen Commander Raduyev. Retrieved on 2006-12-30.
2. ^ In Chechnya, little faith in amnesty (August 9 2006). Retrieved on 2006-12-30.

[edit] External links