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ALI-YURT, Russia-Petimat Tatriyeva was woken up one morning late last month by shouts and banging coming from the courtyard of her home.She said it was a raid by Russian security forces. "About 15 men ... burst into the yard.One of them put a machine gun to my forehead.They said: 'Where are the men? We'll count to ten, then throw a grenade into the house',"she told Reuters."When my 15-year-old son woke up, they threw themselves at him and beat him up,"she said."They beat my husband on the kidneys and pressed their fingers into his eyes."Tatriyeva and her family live in Ingushetia, a mainly Muslim republic where for more than a decade Moscow's forces have been fighting a low-level military campaign against armed Islamist militants linked to separatists in neighboring Chechnya.But things are getting worse.In response to an escalation in attacks by insurgents,Moscow in late July sent in an additional 2,500 interior ministry troops, almost tripling the number of special forces in Ingushetia.The escalation in violence shows that seven years after President Vladimir Putin came to power on a pledge to "wipe out" the insurgency in Russia's North Caucasus region that includes Chechnya and Ingushetia, the rebels are not beaten.In Chechnya, attacks have grown rare, but the problems appear to have shifted next door.Some people in Ingushetia draw parallels with Chechnya eight years ago. Then, after a lull in the fighting that had already dragged on for six years, troops were sent back in to respond to a wave of rebel attacks.That unleashed a new war.Now in Ingushetia, reports emerge almost daily of gun battles or ambushes on police vehicles.This summer the insurgents have killed an aide to Murat Zyazikov, the region's pro-Moscow president, and launched an audacious attack on an army base. Last week a Russian soldier was killed in an attack on a column of troops.In July, the rebels murdered an ethnic Russia schoolteacher, Lyudmila Terekhina, and two of her children.A bomb went off in the cemetery as she was being buried, wounding several mourners.In Ingushetia's capital,Nazran, armored personnel carriers drive through the streets.Roadblocks check the documents of everyone entering the city.To read more go to:
As in the days of Noah...
