By Musa Musayev, exclusively to VK
According to VK's special correspondent in Makhachkala, task forces of 200 servicemen will be deployed in two regions of Dagestan, while 10 regions of the republic will see the creation of temporary police stations, each hosting 100 policemen. These 1200 servicemen will be redeployed from Chechnya
The redeployment of an Interior Troop task force from Chechnya to Dagestan recently became the most discussed topic in the media, as well as on social networks. There was a real information war around it, and numbers were the main weapon of this war. Dagestani President Magomedsalam Magomedov asked not to force the issue and assured the public that there’s nothing out of the ordinary going on: “Yes, we increase the presence of law-enforcement officers. If you take into consideration the population size here in Dagestan, you’ll see that the existing number of policemen is not enough. There are no military operations here, it is part of the regular working process of the Interior Ministry”.
The first one to report this redeployment was the Dagestani newspaper ‘Chernovik’ (‘Draft’): the paper said that a corps of 25,000 servicemen is being introduced to the republic. This figure was repeated by other media agencies.
The authorities reacted to that soon afterwards: the information was denounced by the Dagestani Security Council Secretary as well as the President of the Chechen republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, who said that ‘incompetent journalists are creating panic trying to distract people from the fight against terrorism’. According to him, servicemen of Chechnya haven’t been redeployed anywhere and they carry on their service in the republic, while the latest canard is nothing more that a repetition of similar rumours that took place during mass protest actions in Moscow.
However, these statements didn’t put an end to the information war. On March 19th a Georgian media agency reported that several schools in one of the Dagestan’s regions were closed for troop deployment. Some internet-media agencies continued to inform about the task force redeployment, even though they cited smaller figures.
The main Interior Ministry Office for the NCFD finally confirmed that Minister Nurgaliev had decided to redeploy a part of police special task force from Chechnya to Dagestan in order to stabilize the situation there. The force is headed by police colonel Oleg Kizhayev. However, the force’s numbers were not mentioned in this statement. Only a few days later the Dagestani Security Council Secretary said that task forces of 200 servicemen will be deployed in two regions of Dagestan, while 10 regions of the republic will see the creation of temporary police stations, each hosting 100 policemen. These 1200 servicemen will be re-located to Dagestan from Chechnya.
The force was directed to the regions that have now fallen under the control of the militants. These regions have to face constant acts of terror, murders and attacks by terrorists and armed conflicts between militants and the police.
It is also said that the militants, who camp in the regions’ forests, enjoy a certain level of support from the numerous local population.
On the other hand, it is also obvious that the dislocation of internal troops in these overpopulated regions won’t bring them stability: in order to obtain that, social problems such as unemployment should be resolved.
